


Aware of His Own Halo

by imochan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Blow Jobs, Dirty Talk, Explicit Language, Hot Mess Hux, M/M, Rimming, Sex, Violence, some mentions of suicidal ideation and suicide baiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-05-19 15:04:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 33,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5971294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"What are you doing here,” he says, finally. It almost makes him </i>sober<i>, the petulant effort of forcing it out between the grit of his teeth.</i></p><p>
  <i>“Heard there was some garbage that needed carting off,” says Ren. Placid like the compressed, glassy center of a dark and dying star.  </i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Right,” says Armitage, flicking open the clasp on the holster of his blaster. “That’s it. You can definitely fucking leave.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Or: General Hux’s several not-very-graceful falls from grace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not gonna lie, this fic—which is really just about Hux getting canned, having a nervous breakdown, and Kylo Ren finding him living on a rock so he can just fuck all the shame out of him—it literally only exists because I saw a photo of Domhnall Gleeson with a beard and was _emotionally moved_.
> 
> a million thanks to [reserve](http://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve) and [fluorescentgrey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey) for the betas, convos, love, etc. Could not have finished this behemoth without the cheerleading of the great and wonderful QEP, and the countless messages of support and interest from tumblr. Thank you!

Halfway through his ninth glass of whatever oil-rig swill they were calling Dodbri whiskey these days, a Mantilorrian half-breed with rotting teeth insults former First Order General Armitage Brendol Hux, Commander of Starkiller Base, Destroyer of Planets, Harbinger of the Hosnian Apocalypse, to the extent that something really must be done. Armitage Hux, to his credit, lands at least two respectable, square, closed-fist punches somewhere in the vicinity of what he assumes must be a solar plexus, or perhaps a kidney, before tripping over his own stool, biting halfway through his own tongue when his face makes contact with the cantina floor, and being firmly, bodily, removed from the establishment by the back of his shirt.

"See you tomorrow, Commandant!" says the bartender, jovially, when it is all over, leaning down to pat Armitage on the shoulder and relieve his pocket of his last three credits.

"Fuck you," says Armitage. "I was winning."

"No, you weren't," says the bartender, and the doors hiss shut behind him.

(He thinks about spitting, aggressive and puerile and rattling; the pain in his back and in his jaw making his stomach roil, his mouth full of saliva and hot blood. He swallows, instead, feeling it slither down the back of his gullet, into the hollow pit of his stomach, and climbs unsteadily to his feet.)

“I _was_ ," he says, stubbornly. 

In the cold and empty corridor, there isn’t even an echo to agree with him.

\--

When it finally happens, the bridge is engulfed first by the shockwave—a spiking, bone-shattering blast that curls the skin from his body like wet paper—and then by the white flash of heat, a benediction of fire on his bared skull.

Before this, he is standing with his hands flat on the rail of a console, the air full of ash and instruments screeching, the inhuman wailing of buckling steel, and a noise like the great bellowing cry of a enormous perishing animal, the death-rattle of a star. He braces his palms against the metal and it _gives_ , melting, like putty against his skin, his hands burned up to the wrists. And yet he stands firm. The planet around him is heaving like a cauldron of molten crystal, like the bubbling of rotten meat inside a ring of coals, it belches rock and snow and trees and the shimmering globules of its own innards up into its disintegrating atmosphere, and he still stands firm.

Somewhere around him, glass is shattering. Someone is screaming. Sometimes he thinks it is himself—a long, low, singular animal howling into the heart of a monstrous storm. Sometimes he thinks he hears it as an echo from across the bridge of time, as if the cracks splitting in the earth have unleashed a tremor through the long history of sorrow, of loss, of honor, triumph, failure, hurt, and wanting. Sometimes it is just a scream, from no one mouth, no singular direction, just a claxon in the burning air. 

There is moment that always comes where he cannot see. All is fire, flame, a wash of brilliant ignited crimson across the inside of his eyes, his bones, his marrow painted with it, his sputtering and unworthy lump of flesh suffused with it to the membranes of his cells. It is like the moment he met the sublime, watching it scorch across the sleek velvet black of the universe’s sky, with spittle still hanging from his chin.

A roar, then silence. A vacuum of scarlet—terrible, still, endless, _beautiful_. 

He wakes sweating, wet-faced, shaking, head pounding, muscles spasming like his body is giving up its last pre-mortem gasps. 

He is heartsick and stricken, every time, that it is only a dream.

\--

This time, the pure nauseous roil of his disappointment and the blinding lance of his headache seem to hit at exactly the same moment, which sends his head over the edge of the cot as he retches, and one of his hands clawing out wildly to stop whatever is making _that screaming noise_.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he yells, and immediately regrets it, once he feels the sharp pull in his jaw where something must have clocked him straight across the mouth at some point last night. He dares to open one eye, squint into the dimness, running his tongue against the split in his bottom lip as he pulls himself back onto the cot. His mouth feels swollen, raw; the inside of it tastes like the belly of an incinerator. His left hand is aching, the bones creak unpleasantly when he flexes it against his chest. “Ah—fuck.”

The screaming noise is his alarm, which he’s rigged from his lifepod shuttle distress beacon, and requires him to throw something very heavy at it with great force (usually one of his boots), in order to get it to stop. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says, again, and takes three deep, rib-aching breaths before he’s able to muster the energy and force of will to lean over the cot again, locate a boot with a clutching hand, and hurl it at the opposite wall of the lifepod.

He lies there, one arm hanging over the edge of the cot, and lets the ragged pounding of his headache settle into the rhythm of his racing pulse; lets his eyes adjust and focus. Above him, the same rounded, rusted curve of the ceiling of the lifepod, instruments dimmed out months ago, dotted like dull and useless gems along the sides, the faint, sickly white glow of the internal bulb, rigged into the waystation’s generators now. When he turns his head on the cot, there is the darkened pod window, the escape hatch, the single chair and dead console. (He never thinks about the _Finalizer_ , in moments like this, never: not of its gleaming surfaces and wide corridors and spacious echoes, of its bright coolness and atria like carpets of glass, of its gentle, buttery humming, the flawless turbine of its engine like the heartbeat of a powerful avian. He does not think about waking into refreshed vigor, into ambition, into the crisp and righteous light of beginning, of continuing.)

His routine, such that it is, then proceeds as normal, such that it is: he will pull himself up to sitting and brace his elbows on his knees until his heart stops racing and battering the inside of his ribs; he will reach out with one hand and find whatever remains of last night’s cigarras and smoke one until the nausea of the dream softens sufficiently under the nausea of the narcotic; he will tug on his boots; he will find the nearest of his two shirts and pull it over his head; he will get to his feet, find his blaster on the floor, clip it on his waist, and stumble out the hatch door into the dim, cold corridor of the waystation’s backend.

He has been here more than eighteen months now, and he still harbors a dull and seething hatred for it all: the grimy patchwork, the lack of water rations, the disorganized clutter of the backend hovel, the _slum_ of cobbled-together, rusted-out freighter pods and shuttles and metal scaffolding hooked into the lifeless, useless rock of meteor crust. He hates how the whole misshapen lump just circles aimlessly in some long, undefined Outer Rim orbit, as if even gravity itself couldn't be bothered to tug the whole small, stupid thing into the path of a ravenous anomaly and put it out of its misery. He hates how no one calls it Waystation 4-X, but instead by that sick little slur, _The 4X,_ or worse yet, _The Forks_ , as if it deserves the childish respect and affection of pet name. He hates, however much it may have saved his life, how simple it has been to disappear. He hates, even more, how easily it came to him.

He hates that he is just another wandering bit of astral dust, atoms in the shape of a man forgotten on the edges of a universe with a cruel sense of judgment and no sense of humor. He hates that he imagines that when the other dirty, miserable bits of life on this rock look at him, all they see is something insane, amusing, _endearing,_ even _,_ in his clearly delusional fantasy of having once been the commander of a formidable armada that struck terror into the reaches of the galaxy’s stable center. 

_General Hux!_ Some lumpy bit of toxic skin in the shape of an alien species had chortled at him across the bar one evening cycle, some time in the third month of his arrival. _That dirty hoo-man foetus isn't General Hux—he's fucking dead._

So be it, he’d thought.

He hates his constant headaches. Hates alcohol, smoking; hates the vices in their interminable chokehold on his productivity, self-worth, ambition, health. He hates the tremors in his hands that start before noon, the constant nausea roiling in the pit of his gut, the rattling wheeze in his chest that developed six months ago, after a bout with the Bondan Flu that left him bedridden and choking on his own mucus for ten days. He hates feeling the film of filth on his skin, like a sentient membrane, consuming him slowly from the outside-in. He hates, in the way that he can barely be bothered to feel any feeling at all, that there is no obvious reason to do anything about any of it.

He hates the cantina. He hates his lifepod quarters. He hates the corridors: half-rock, half-corroded metal, all grime. He hates the communal refresher. He kicks the door of it open with the toe of his boot and sneers at the smell, at the (thankfully) empty row of rusted stalls and drainage holes. It has been maybe two weeks since he last had a shot at a shower, with the water rations so strict and his perceived station status so low that nobody bothered to mention when they’d been briefly re-upped last week.

Beside the row of basins, there is a bowl of soapy water that looks, frankly, fucking fetid. The thought of washing any part of himself with it sends his empty stomach into a soft roil of displeasure, and he braces one hand against the ledge of sinks; closes his eyes, wills it to pass. 

It doesn’t. His knees feel weak. There is a clammy sweat gathering on the nape of his neck, his palms. His body betrays him; he hates it— _he hates it_. It sends him careening, always, into a terrible somatic echo, towards the last time he was himself (righteous, tall, respected), and then everything compressed into a hot singularity of loss: everything— _gone_. 

At the beginning, he had protested. 

“ _Supreme Leader, I—”_

“Fuck,” he whispers. Of all the nightmares he’s had now, feverish or drunk or suffocated by his own position, this one is the worst. It comes when he’s awake. It won’t leave, not really, not by any coaxing of the numbing properties of alcohol or drugs or sheer will of manipulation of his own memory, it won’t _leave_. He has yet to find a way to make it dissipate into the ether of his cells, to have it be a softly faded bit of unpleasantness, like the time his father first struck him, or the memory of his mother’s funeral, her white hands folded like small doves across her chest, a spill of golden-red hair strewn with lilies. 

_“Did you think I would be pleased? Did you think I would forgive you your complete and utter failures simply because you managed to bring me my single knight, half-whole and unconscious?”_

He had protested. 

_Supreme Leader_ , he had said. _I have done everything you ordered. The Resistance—_

Snoke had been unmoved.

_“You and your incompetence have cost—us—everything!”_

It had already been decided, he realizes now. 

_“You have clearly reached the limits of your usefulness, General.”_

It had been a blind entrance, his arrival with the staggering remnants of the First Order fleet and the comatose, bacta-floating body of Kylo Ren. He had drifted furious and heartsick and seething into his own execution chamber. 

Snoke in the flesh somehow worse than the holoprojection. That withered, pockmarked face and diminished body cutting him off at the legs and leaving him swinging in the dark. He could have reached out and killed him, Armitage thinks. _I could have strangled his small throat with only one of my hands_ , he thinks. _I could have left him bleeding black blood, slumped at the foot of that_ ridiculous _throne_ , he thinks, _with one shot of my blaster._

No one would have stopped me, he thinks. I was second-in-command.

_“You will be given a lifepod. You will take it, to wherever you think best to ruminate on the immensity of your failure. You are summarily relieved of your duty to the Order.”_

The words had settled over him like a wash of warm water against his cold and clammy skin. He supposes now it had been something like a gift, to have been given no choice at all, to not have had to feel the keen sting of it until he had woken, dazed, as if from some sunlit reverie, hours later and skating at the edges of an asteroid belt, the steady, whining noise of the distress beacon searing a pattern of lancing heat through his pounding head.

_“I will be given a lifepod. I will take it, to wherever I think best to ruminate on the immensity of my failure.”_

In the ‘fresher, now, the memory has a strange and hollow ringing about it inside his skull, as if it were a holofilm he might have watched when he was young. He stares at his face in the grimy bit of mirror drilled into the metal wall: a now-familiar purpling under his eyes, matted beard, regulation cut gone to shit and streaked with sweat and grease. A new bruise along one cheek, the puffiness on his lower lip from whatever got him in the mouth settling into a darker, scabby red. He leans in, both hands on the edge of the basin; watches in the mirror as he catches at it with his teeth, feels the quick sting, the healing crust burst. 

_“I am relieved of my duty to the Order.”_

He spits into the sink, and turns his back on his reflection.

\--

“Good morning, Armitage,” sing-songs the Twi’lek from behind the bar. Young, blue-skinned, with some no-doubt deeply traumatic sexual slavery in her past, Armitage assumes, she worked the early cycles when the cantina sold coffee (mostly instant caf) and stimtea, spoke with a lilting childlike tone, and seemed to be the only person in the entire waystation backend that called him by his name, instead of the seemingly endless string of sarcastic, nonsensical military rankings.

“You look like shit,” she says, with a wide smile, placing a steaming cup down on the bar in front of him. She pronounces it like she does not really know what it means.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ve seen.”

“I have put something in there for you, yes?”

She winks, and the scalding combination of caffeine and liquor slides down his throat; he can feel the itch of the tremors in his hands fading before they’ve even had time to completely send his day careening into the territory of one-hundred-percent bollocks-up.

In another time, he thinks, he might have attempted something approaching flirtation. She was always very kind to him, for some unfathomable reason (even if perhaps the reason was simply that she was very kind to every piece of cosmic dirt that sidled up to her bar and drooled enough credits into her palms for her to feel like she really _was_ moving up in the world, now that she wasn’t being forced to take all manner of alien pricks into her blue cunt at all hours of the day). In another time, he thinks, he might have deigned to nod approvingly, silently, enough that she might know that he was pleased, but not too much to assume that they should speak, that they were _equals_. 

“Thank you,” he says. It feels hollow; strange and thick on his tongue. He stands, drains his cup, digs a hand into his pocket for whatever credits are left. (There are none, of course.)

“On the house,” she lilts, waving him off with a soft and graceful gesture. “I know you have been working very hard, lately. Although do not tell the others, yes? They will be jealous!”

There is a part of him that will immediately file this away, this moment—the moment when General Armitage B. Hux, the single hope of a dynastic spark, prodigy, accomplished strategist, galactic nightmare, was cowed into awkward, slump-shouldered shame, by the pity of a pretty whore. 

The rest of him will continue to pretend.

 _Jealous_. The cantina doors hiss shut behind him. _If they knew_ —

To stalk rigid-spined, tense-legged, aching and still half-asleep, from the cantina on the backend to the shipbay on the far side of the waystation, takes just enough time for the caf and liquor to start its work, but not nearly enough time for his headache to dissipate. Instead, by the time he has climbed the last scaffolding stairwell to the doors of the bay, it has settled into a steady pressure in the back of his skull, radiating into his temples. 

The Forks’ shipyard constitutes a dozen bays, stacked on top of one another like the hive of some large and injured hibernating insect, half-completed and haphazard, connected to each other with the treacherous metal arteries of steel scaffolding, spiderwebs of ladders and the cluttered eaves of catwalks. When he’d first arrived, there had been an old man with a rusted prosthetic arm who seemed to be involved some scheme involving old techdroids and smuggler freighter repair, until the day about three weeks later when the old man simply wasn’t there, anymore, and no one on-station seemed remotely interested in where he might have gone. The graveyard of his labor had been shoved into one corner of the bay by an airshaft, picked over for useful parts and valuable metal, and left to rot. 

The bays are never full: usually four or five dark, deadened, hulking shadows of the hulls skulking in the shadows of their dockings—they arrive without fanfare and leave quickly, as silently as possible. Sometimes, if one stays for longer than two or three week cycles, its occupants having neither the will nor the ability to leave on their own power, it will eventually get towed into the backend and made a permanent fixture, a new cell in the toxic little tumor of life growing out of the meteor’s crust, barely worth the oxygen thinly pumping through the corridors.

There is one freighter now, in an upper bay on the far side of the yard, that seems to be made up mostly of all the worst bits of every Outer Rim scavenger ship in existence. He skirts the bays, pulls himself up onto the scaffolding, and ducks under the hull until he finds the open hatch; from inside the darkened hole, there is the the hum of a laz-spanner and the warm flickering of sparks. 

He leans up, raps his knuckles on the outside of the hull; the sound of the spanner stops short.

“You’re late,” comes a voice from inside the hole. There is the noise of someone moving about in the hull, a dull echoing of metal scraping against metal, and then a clench of small, pearly-colored fingers extends downwards, and unceremoniously hands him a fistful of white analgesics.

“I’m not _late_ , Chumma,” he says, taking the pills and swallowing them dry. “No one on this blasted rock ever knows what time it is anyway.”

“They wanted out by third cycle, and we’ve still got to overhaul this mess of rotted-out repulsorlift cages, and now we’ve got a new dock in Bay 11 that rolled in last cycle that needs the hyperdrive looked at.”

“What’s wrong with it?” He pulls himself up into the hatch, lets his legs dangle out the hole, scans the inside of the freighter’s underbelly.

“I don’t know, you strange speckle-faced human, that’s why we’ve got to look at it.” As Armitage’s eyes adjust to the dimness, the little mass in the corner pulls itself up from a crouch and hands him a second prepped and humming laz-spanner, small face pulled into an expression that Armitage now knows is supposed to be a grin. “But they’ll pay us 200 creds for it.”

Chumma Blat was of some unfamiliar Outer Rim speciation, of indeterminate gender and origin, standing barely three feet high, with eyes like wide, yellow flare pulses and skin the color of pearl that wrinkled like tissue in the folds of its joints. It spoke with a voice like a low whistle, and seemed to have the complete monopoly on whatever passed for “honest” shipyard work on this hollowed-out and crumbling rock since the departure of the old droidtech. It tended to regard Armitage with something approaching incredulous bemusement, found the color of his hair very unappealing, and asked no questions (other than: _Where in the frozen hells have you put the spanner?_ And: _Are you going to finish that coolant repair any time this cycle, or will I have to do it myself?_ ), for which Armitage was gently, almost mindlessly grateful.

“I want work,” he had said, when he first stalked up to Chumma in the half-light of the corridor outside the cantina, six weeks after first getting his lifepod towed into the backend of The Forks: his shoulders set, nails digging half-moons into the flesh of his palms. _Need_ was too much like begging; he was not there, not yet.

“What can you do?” said Chumma Blat, its eyes like beacons in the dimness.

 _I can lead armies into battle_ , he had thought. _I can command warships and build empires. I can destroy whole worlds, whole systems, wipe out life with a single word. I can wield the power of a star and bend it to my will. I can dream into the darkness, into the chaotic abyss of history and ruin, and where before there was only nothing, I can make_ order _._

“I can fix ships,” he’d said. 

“Any good at it?” asked Chumma Blat.

 _I was second in my class at the Academy. I drafted the first schematics for_ Starkiller _in my own hand. I built an army from their births and inspired the currents of their very blood with loyalty. I could draw you a map of the_ Finalizer _from memory. I handpicked my officers with the kind of acuity and judgment only my father could truly appreciate. I followed orders. I minded a wild, childish creature with a penchant for expensive, violent tantrums and negligent sabotage, and still plucked him whole from the cold skin of a quaking, dying planet and delivered him healing into the arms of he who had asked. I am supremely, singularly competent._

“Very good,” he’d said. 

“What's my cut?” He says now, tugging a pair of goggles from the techkit Chumma has hauled up into the hatch and strapping them to his head.

“40,” says Chumma, turning back to the grimy mess of repulsorlift cables.

“You little _thief_ , if you think—” he starts. 

“60, then,” says Chumma, and turns on the laz-spanner.

“70,” he yells, over the sparks and the hissing.

“Deal,” says Chumma, flicking off the spanner and pulling the folds of its face into a grin, again. “You are no businessman, _General_. But it is enough to get you nice and drunk for several days, I think.”

It pats him on the arm, and turns back to the twisted piles of metal and wires.

Armitage grimaces. He does not protest. There is work to be done, and at the end of the day, the blasted little alien is more right than it knows. 

\-- 

It is nearly two full cycles later when Chumma leans back on its small heels and declares the repairs well enough done. Armitage gathers up the techkit and gives the cages one last disparaging once over, as Chumma jumps down from the hatch and skitters off to the shipyard exit, returning by the time Armitage has carted the techkit down to the lower level, its hands full with two bowls of capsule noodles. 

(It also returns with a small metal flask of sharp, clear, medicinal homebrew, which it plunks down besides Armitage’s thigh without comment. He takes three long pulls, which is enough to quiet the tremors that have already started again in his hands, and gives it back, silently. He has always suspected that Chumma may not actually even drink itself, but indulges him to the extent that it keeps his fingers steady and his functionality just on this side of serviceable. It is a strange and foreign species of generosity. He does not like it.)

They eat in silence, like they always do, crouched on the broken and discarded wing of a starfighter, grease-covered and flecked with the hot spittle of melted metal and laz-spanner sparks. Armitage is nearly finished, face buried in the oily broth, when he notices that Chumma has been staring at him.

“What,” he says.

“Your face is broken,” remarks Chumma, mouth full of noodle.

“I fell,” he says.

Chumma’s laugh is like a squeal. “Into a fist?”

He lifts his face from his bowl again just long enough to glare.

“Ay, ay,” Chumma waves a dismissive hand at him, throws down its empty bowl, hopping down from the wing. “Always so serious, General. You finished?”

“What’s next?” he tosses his bowl into Chumma’s, snaps the goggles back onto his head and hauling up the techkit.

“Hyperdrive,” says Chumma, beckoning him. “Here in the back bay.”

They clamber up together, to the very back of the shipyard, the farthest bay from the exit, where the catwalks are cluttered with droid parts and discarded bits of techkit, and the shadows gather aggressively against the two only working strips of overhead light, which flicker and strobe unpleasantly, like frightened insects. 

He expects nothing. He expects another freighter. Everything up until now, from the moment he first settled into the nauseous realization that nothing again would ever really matter, not in the way that it had before, everything up until now has been about the increasing dullness of losing all forms of expectation. And so it takes a moment, when he climbs the last ladder and pulls himself up into the bay behind Chumma, before he realizes what he is seeing. It is like having a ghost materialize from the darkness of a dream, like the flicker of a holoproj in the corner of his vision, the static of an ancient comm-message in his ear. 

He stops short.

“This is First Order,” he says. It sounds hoarse; it catches in his throat.

“What?” Chumma is humming under its breath, running its little fingers over the hull, trying to find the panel for the underbelly hatch.

“This is—” he swallows, tightly. His chest hurts; he feels vaguely dizzy. “This ship is registered to the First Order _._ ” 

“It’s not registered,” says Chumma, absently. “Use your small human eyes. Where are you seeing registration?”

It is right. The hull is black, blank, matte. No insignia. No callsign. Frantically, Armitage leans in, ducks under the hull to the other side of the ship, lets his palm run over the underside of the wing, looking for the serial encryption. 

_Nothing_.

But this is Upsilon-class, he thinks. It has to be. He is _sure_ of it. Smaller overall, maybe, and the large stabilizers replaced with what looked like a less identifiable profile of a rigid cross-wing, but the bulk of the hull is the same: flat, square, the snub-nose and perfect little protrusion of the cannons. 

“Whose ship is this?” he demands, tugging the goggles from his head with a snap. His cheeks feel hot; his skin is prickling. His headache is suddenly a low roar in his ears, pounding in his jaw.

Chumma, from the other side of the hull, is still humming.

“ _Chumma_ ,” he snaps, loudly. “Where’s the bloody manifest for this ship?” 

Chumma stops, tilts its head, blinks its wide, reptilian eyes at him, and then bursts out laughing.

“You _are_ funny, sometimes,” it chortles. “A _manifest_.”

“Yes,” he hisses. “A manifest—who brought this in?”

“ _General_ ,” says Chumma, calmly. “How would I know that?”

“Who was it?” he says, climbing back under the hull. He wants to fucking _throttle_ the little alien. “Didn’t you speak to them?”

Chumma lifts its slight shoulders in a shrug. “It was a human. One human. Said the hyperdrive was broken. Like I said before. I didn’t ask for the family history, you know.”

“What did they look like?”

Chumma grins. “Like you.”

“Like _me_?”

It sighs, waving a hand. “I was trying not to be so species-est, _General_. It was a human, you know you all look alike to me.”

“You’re bloody _useless_ , you—”

“I—” says Chumma, turning to him and poking him in the midsection with one, long, pearly finger. Its yellow eyes are narrowed. “—am where you get your credits. And we have work to do. Stop making so many loud noises out of your very large mouth and help me get this hatch open.”

Armitage clenches his jaw, a prickly, anxious sort of heat growing in his chest. He reaches out, and with one fist, slams the hidden button for the underbelly hatch. The door on the underside of the hull slides open with the perfectly sibilant hiss of a seamless, flawlessly executed hydraulic seal. It makes his heart ache.

“ _There_ ,” he says, sharply.

“Oh,” says Chumma. “Good, you found it.”

“Chumma,” he hisses. 

“Hmm?” says Chumma, absently snapping its own goggles to the top of its head. 

“Ididn’t _find_ it,” he snaps. “I _designed_ it.”

Chumma pauses, squints its large, yellow eyes at the button panel, and then turns back to Armitage. “And it’s very nice,” it says, climbing into the hatch, dragging the techkit after it.

“Oh my god,” says Armitage. 

\--

“ _There’s nothing wrong with it_ ,” he hisses at Chumma, for the sixth time in the last half-cycle.

“Said there was,” Chumma shrugs, although it won’t budge from where it is crouched over the hyperdrive motivator, its small pearly face pulled into pursed little frown. It has tried everything it knows (which even Armitage will admit is quite a lot); it seems almost frustrated by its inability to diagnose, stymied by perfection and performance: expecting rot and rust and finding seamless joints, flawless consoles, the honey-ish purr of the sublight engine.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he says, again. “I can tell just by _looking_ at it.”

“So go, then,” says Chumma, uncharacteristically tight. It is poking at the alluvial dampers connex, which Armitage knows does not need any poking at, even remotely.

“Fine. This is a waste of time,” he sneers, pulling himself to his feet. If this is a _trap_ , he wants at least two more exits in view, and a far higher vantage point than the darkened hull of a mysterious shuttle. “Fuck your 70 credits.”

Chumma does not respond.

\--

“‘allo, it’s our Supreme Leader,” says the half-breed behind the bar, when Armitage squeezes between two jabbering Sullustans to find his usual stool in the back corner. “All hands at attention, then?”

“That ‘joke’ is two years old, BeeTee,” says Armitage, feeling the tight-jawed tug of his racing pulse, the creaking of his anxious joints. He points significantly at the bottle of whiskey on the bar rack. “And you’re an ugly fuck with too many eyes.”

“Ugly fuck who’s pourin’ your drinks, mate,” says BeeTee. “So you can mind your ginger mouth.”

“You stole three credits from me last night,” says Armitage, downing the first drink as quickly as BeeTee can push it at him.

“You owed me _nine_ ,” says BeeTee. “We’ll make it an even four yet if you can make it out of here tonight without cartwheelin’ out onto your soft white little belly because a Mantilorrian decided your beard was offensive.”

“Was that the problem?” He tries for his best sneer. “Here I was thinking it was because I called his mother a cross-species fraternizing slut.”

“If you’d gotten all those words out in that order, Commandant, I’d have been very impressed,” says BeeTee, pouring him another. “To mind, I also would’ve punched you meself.”

“Fuck off,” he growls, turning in his seat a little, craning his neck so that he can scan the cantina crowd for whoever might have been the human that Chumma had spoken to, whoever might have steered that Upsilon shuttle into the Forks shipbay sometime last night. 

“Lookin’ for someone?” BeeTee says.

He feels his cheeks color, snaps his eyes back to the bar. “Anyone’s better than you,” he tries. It sounds hollow, distracted. He knocks his drink back, lets the empty tumbler glass skitter on the counter when he lets it go.

“Used to be,” says BeeTee, leaning in, pouring him one more. “You just kept to yourself, like.”

“I assure you,” he says, deliberately only making eye contact with his glass of whiskey. “That is still my most passionate intention.”

BeeTee snorts. “Three fights this month, mate.”

He lifts his head only long enough to sneer. “Was not.”

BeeTee lifts a withered hand, counts them off: “Mantillorian, human, the one with the green bits.”

Armitage purses his mouth; chews at the inside of his lip. The memory is vague, but he’s positive he hadn’t been sure what that green one had been called either.

“All I’m sayin’ is,” says BeeTee. “I’ll keep servin’ you. Up to you to keep that ugly head of yours on straight.”

He is about to say, _Which one of us is the ugly one_ , when he feels a tug on the hem of his shirt. He turns on his stool and Chumma is there, peering up at him between two massive Sullustan thighs, hand extended with a fistful of credits.

“Told him there was nothing wrong with the ‘drive,” it says, as Armitage gathers them up, counts them on his lap—35 in all.

“Still insisted on paying half,” continues Chumma. “So for you, just enough for tonight, maybe.”

“Aye, he can stretch that far enough for two nights if he’s nice to me,” says BeeTee, leaning over the bar.

Armitage flips him off, stuffing the creds in his trousers with his other hand.

“See you tomorrow, General,” says Chumma, waving a pearly little fist of fingers as it totters off toward the exit.

“What’ll it be, then?” says BeeTee.

“Just—” he hesitates, feeling the weight of the credit chips in his pocket, the stinging hiss of whiskey against the back of his tongue, the anxious clench of _something_ in his bones and along his skin, like the prickling of the hairs on the back of one’s neck when you know you are being watched in the dark. “Just, more.”

\--

Usually, it is between drinks five and six when he starts thinking of his father. Usually, if he has enough credits, the thoughts will be gone by drink number eight, punctuated by the last time he had seen him alive, while nursing number seven.

The room had been warm, almost to the point of stifling; he had felt the reassuring hum of an ion engine like a caress through his legs. His father’s lips been stained with the dull bloom of wine. Armitage can’t remember now, what was said. 

Sometimes he imagines it wasn’t important. It was just another conversation, another small gesture of his prowess and demonstration of his pride where he tried just too hard, spoke a little too loudly, held his own spine too straight and rigid. Just another exchange where _his father_ always knew exactly how badly he craved the things that only _his father_ had the power to deny him; the only space in the entire universe where he could be denied _anything_ , where he could be made to beg, in small pauses, in silences, in muddled gestures and breath held in the miniscule black, wet space of a mouth between clenched teeth, for _anything_. Sometimes he imagines that it doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes he imagines that it is insignificant. 

It had been three weeks before he was to take command of the _Finalizer_. They would promote him—to General. Maybe because of it, he thinks, sometimes. It was reported that it was an accident. So _unfortunate_ , such an _illustrious career_ , to have been so cruelly shortened by the unintended chaos of the cosmos, that Commandant Brendol Hux would be felled by a simple technical blunder, mechanical failure—or, worse: human _error_. 

“Oi.”

He lifts his head. He hadn’t realized he’d put it down in the first place.

BeeTee is looking at him, significantly.

“ _What_ ,” he growls. His throat is rough, dry; his face feels hot. His glass is empty. He nudges it towards BeeTee with an elbow. 

“You’ve got company,” says BeeTee.

Armitage squints at him; his vision swims. “Funny,” he says, snorting when BeeTee’s refilled his glass. “You’re very funny.”

BeeTee rolls his third eye, flicks his towel in Armitage’s general direction. “I’m not funny,” he says. “And you’ve got _company_. The kind that’s been starin’ at you across the ‘tina since you stumbled your arse in.”

“No one,” he says, firmly, into his glass. “Is here. For me.”

“I’d say he is, mate,” says BeeTee.

“Stop. Just—stop.” He wants to push his eyeballs all the way into the back of his skull with the flat of his thumbs, just to put a biting stop to the headache that’s started to crowd into his temples. “I really am only interested in being left alone.” 

“Wish I could help you, Commandant, but he’s li’erally right behind you.”

In hindsight, it is one of the moments in his life that he will most actively, passionately regret, despite even all the rest of it to come: swivelling in his stool, mouth open for retort, shoulders tensed to meet whatever slimy bit of backwater Outer Rim filth has decided to slither out of its hole and accost him, and instead finding the literal wind knocked out of him directly through the clench of his heart and the suddenly tight cage of his ribs.

His hair is different: longer, darker, and pulled away from his face in a knot at the back of his head. But his face is the same: long-nosed, pale-skinned, disconcertingly young and gentle along the jaw, the two moles dotted on his forehead and cheek like the speckles of flicked ink. The cauterized sear of the wound has settled into a streak of dull red scarring, edges like torn paper. He is unmasked. 

Armitage Hux is, in that moment, suddenly and acutely aware of how he must look: grime-covered and gaping, unwashed for weeks now, beard untrimmed, hair wild, bruised in the face and red in the eyes, wearing a two-year-old pair of grease-stained uniform trousers and a threadbare jumper he won from a blaster-scarred, shifty-eyed human with an old-Coruscant accent in a game of holochess nine months ago, fisting a glass of possibly the worst whiskey in the entire galaxy.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says.

“Hello, General,” says Kylo Ren. 


	2. Chapter 2

He had kept them at red alert.

Long after they stumbled from the shuttle into the _Finalizer_ ’s bay, the bevy of medics already gathered like frantic swallows to receive the stretcher, the fronts of their smocks soaked with blood, long after he had shouted at them over the roar of engines and the tearing of planetary crust and the shuddering echoes of the metal shell of the ship buckling and warping with the red-hot ripples of gravity exploded outward into space, with the tug of a newly-birthed star at their heels: _Keep him alive!_ And: _That is an order!—_ he had kept them at red alert. 

He watched them scurry off with Kylo Ren’s dead weight. There had still been snow in his hair. His cheeks were wet, his skin the unpleasant, translucent greying sheen of an animal bleeding out. 

“Sir—” Phasma met him at the door of the shuttle bay, her armor dented and her helmet gone, somewhere. Her face was pale, streaked with grime, her wide mouth set in a hard, tight line. Behind her, Mitaka: the whites of his eyes showing.

“Get me the report!” he snapped. The ship had shuddered, hard, as it was buffeted with another sharp explosive wave from the _Starkiller_ ’s death, from the gluttonous freedom of the new star left behind. They all stumbled, in the corridors, bracing themselves. Somewhere from deep in the ship, Armitage could hear wire snapping, pipes bursting, hull plating peeling from its metal skeleton, ion gases hissing into the dead vacuum of space. “Mitaka!”

“Sir!”

“Get us out of here.” His skull was pounding; his limbs felt heavy and hot, his throat coated with bile. “I want us in hyperdrive as soon as possible.”

“Sir,” Mitaka, breathing heavily, almost tripping over his own feet to keep up; something in his face had looked like _fear_ , and it made Armitage’s stomach heave. “We’re heavily damaged, we’ve lost hull plating, life-support failing on several decks—I’m not sure, I’m still waiting on reports from several departments. There are—casualties, the fleet is—scattered. We’ve had numerous requests for—” 

“They have the coordinates,” he barked. “I want this ship _running_. Get to engineering and _get us out of here_.”

Mitaka had saluted, turned on his heel, fled. It looked frantic, unsteady. The ship shuddered again in answer to Armitage’s roiling nerves. 

He rounded on Phasma. “ _Where have you been_.”

“Sir—” She had one hand braced against a doorframe; the grimness of defeat in every joint of her bones. “The traitor.”

He’d wanted to _scream_. 

Instead, he kept them at red alert. He collected statistics, scrolled through reports, barked orders, he allocated resources, re-established comm lines. He stood with both feet planted firmly on the deck of the bridge and made an announcement, ship-wide, declaring in no uncertain terms that _The First Order is unbowed, unbroken_ and that _the traitorous, toxic sting of the Resistance_ _has barely tested our true power_ and _I commend your service, your courage, your skill, your stalwart faith_ , and _as does our Supreme Leader_. 

Only when they’d limped the _Finalizer_ into hyperdrive, did he leave the bridge. He paused just outside the officer’s medbay for a moment, feeling the struggling thrum of the engines through the soles of his boots, hearing the distant echo of trooper footfalls rushing along a polished floor. He steeled himself, taken both of his hands and smoothed his hair back along the line of his skull, slowly (the pressure mitigated, for a moment, the throb of the headache in his temples); he took a long, steadying breath, let the oxygen push all the way into his belly, and then he’d keyed the medbay doors open with his fist.

“Sir—” the medic turned to him sharply, one hand flying up to his forehead in a salute.

“Report,” Armitage said.

“His condition is still critical, sir.” The medic nodded towards the back of the medbay, where the trio of bacta-tanks stood. Only one was operational. In it, Kylo Ren’s body, stripped bare and floating. 

Armitage felt something fluttering and strange in his ribs. Felt his pulse leap, briefly, like a shot of adrenaline. 

“What does that mean,” he said, almost without thinking. He stepped closer—closer than he’d wanted to. “Critical.”

“He’s lost a great deal of blood,” the medic said, scrolling firmly through the datapad. “Took a bowcaster bolt to the left abdomen. A plethora of superficial injuries, three broken ribs, numerous tendons torn, a probable concussion, severe burns to his shoulder and his face, broken left hand. He was barely conscious when he arrived, sir, but we’ve decided to sedate him fully, and keep him that way. He needs at least another two days in the tank, probably three to be safe, and—well.”

The medic paused. It took Armitage a moment to realize he was waiting for _permission_. Tearing his eyes away from the sullen glow of the bacta proved more difficult than he’d ever care to admit. He considered turning away entirely, fixing his attention elsewhere, setting about tugging the cuffs of his uniform into place.

“This situation requires your honesty, Doctor,” he said, instead. The blue glow of the tank still fluttered in his peripheral.

“One of the nurses had the previous—experience of treating him for a minor injury,” the medic conceded, with a grimace. “We decided on continuous sedation.” 

“Well-advised,” Armitage said; he was staring at the tank again before the words were even past his lips. 

Ren was like a lump of clay. A misshapen, archaic, primitive votive. He’d looked—Armitage struggled with it—somehow _more_ animal, like this. Stripped of everything, suspended in this mechanical womb, he’d looked like a creature still forming. Nature not yet sure what to make of him. 

Thin straps coiled under his arms, keeping him afloat. A breathing apparatus strapped to his face. His skin still that putrid wash of grey. The slash of burnt skin across his brow and cheek. The crumpled, pulsing dark mouth of the wound hugging his lower ribs. Bruising on his shoulders, wrists, thighs. His hair like a thick halo of black flame. (Armitage remembered, in that moment, the image of white snow, of small crystals caught like struggling moths in a web of darkness. His fingertips had felt cold in his gloves.) He looked like a slab of hanging meat. Like a struggling infant animal. Like an otherworldly jewel. Like a broken bit of machinery. Like a chrysalized creature shedding the fleshly, ungainly pulp of its larva sac. Like the naked, wounded body of an unconscious man, stripped and bleeding, who had earlier gripped at the back of Armitage’s neck with his bare, freezing fingers and hissed in his ear, ringed with the smell of iron and burned flesh, lips hot with rage and glory and spittle against Armitage’s jaw, when he had found him in the snow: _I did it_.

He had looked beautiful. Attainable. A young, strong body struggling with life, sweet with pallor, heaving with loss.

_“Sir_.” Mitaka’s voice on his comm, ringed with static. Armitage startled, like blinking away a thick fog. “ _Sir, I have Major Kaplan_ _for you, as requested_.”

“On my way,” he replied. When he wrenched his eyes away and turned toward the medic, his headache returned, the throb quick and sharp (he hadn't realized it had stopped, or that his pulse had been racing). “I want to be personally notified if his condition changes, doctor.”

“Yes, sir.”

He glanced behind him once more, as he turned to leave. _Already_ , he thought, _already I’m haunted by this poorly healing corpse and he hasn't even_ _had the decency to fully_ die _on me yet._

“He is a _priority_ ,” he said. The medic’s face had been strobed with red, his throat and collar speckled with a spray of old blood. “Is that clear.”

He had kept them at red alert. And Kylo Ren’s body hung suspended: oblivious, gentle, dappled with the dark blossoms of dying cells.

\--

It isn’t until he’s wobbling half-stupid on the edge of barstool in the bowels of The Forks with the film of whiskey burning on the back of his throat, faced with the undeniable reality of it, that he realizes he hadn’t known whether Ren had even survived.

“You're alive,” he says, dumbly.

“Yes,” says Ren.

“You’re alive,” he says, again, tongue sticking in his mouth. “You—”

“You look like shit,” says Ren.

It makes him _angry_ —suddenly, irrationally. That he should be interrupted well on his way to reeling oblivion, in his own little grease-sucking hovel, _his_ chosen foxhole at the lost edges of the galaxy, by Kylo Ren’s cleanly scarred face, his fresh skin, his neatly pared-down black tunic, his horribly familiar breadth of body and way of standing as if the air itself should make room for him.

“What are you _doing_ here?” he says, finally. It almost makes him _sober_ , the petulant effort of forcing it out between the grit of his teeth.

“Heard there was some garbage that needed carting off,” says Ren. Placid like the compressed, glassy center of a dark and dying star. 

“Right,” says Armitage, setting his glass down with one hand and flicking open the clasp on the holster of his blaster with the other. “That’s it. You can definitely fucking leave.”

Ren’s wrist twitches at his side, and suddenly Armitage finds himself frozen—locked in place by some icy and terrifying weight. His fingers, immobile, are clutched at the hilt of his blaster; he’s tilted forward with one foot flat on the floor and the other dangling from the rung of the stool; he can barely draw _breath_. Ren pushes forward and stands by his shoulder at the bar. 

“Fuck you,” Armitage hisses. “Fuck you, _fuck you_ , let me g—”

“Calm down,” says Ren, low-voiced. “You’re making a scene.”

“I’ll show you a karking _scene_ ,” he chokes. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Armitage can see Ren lean forward to place his elbows on the bar in a gesture of supremely practiced nonchalance.

“Don’t you want to play nice, General?” Ren murmurs. 

“Fuck you,” he says, again, just for good measure. His thighs are beginning to ache, frozen in tension somewhere between flight and fight; his fingers are cramping.

“Pay attention,” says Ren. “When I let you go, you’re going to leave that blaster alone. You’re going to sit quietly and listen to what I have to say. I’m not here to harm you.” 

“I don’t believe you,” he hisses.

“Those weren’t suggestions,” says Ren. “Understood?”

Armitage feels saliva gathering hot in his mouth. He makes a choking grunt; jerks his chin as best he can while still in the grip of that horrible, tense, chilling immobility. To his left, he sees Ren flex one large, gloved hand, as if cracking his knuckles, and suddenly it is as if all the air in the room floods all at once back into Armitage’s lungs. He shudders, inhaling in a great gasp, and his limbs spasm as they’re released: something like the sharp, hot sting of numbness travels from his fingertips to his chest. He stumbles, catches himself, and rounds on Ren, bracing both hands against the edge of the bar.

“Better,” says Ren, and signals at the bartender with a raised finger.

“Who’s your friend, Commandant?” says BeeTee, when he appears in front of them, craggy face twisted in an unmistakeable suppression of glee.

Armitage, still catching his breath, hopes that the twist of his clenched expression makes it clear exactly what kind of _friend_ Kylo Ren is.

“How fragged is he?” asks Ren, tilting his head in Armitage’s direction.

BeeTee flattens one gnarled hand and teeters it back and forth across the surface of the bar, as if to say: _ehhh_.

“Not nearly enough,” growls Armitage, at the same time, bracing one shaking hand on the edge of the bar. With the other he tugs at the already overstretched collar of his shirt.

Ren doesn’t look at him. “One more,” he says; his chin dips in the direction of Armitage’s half-empty glass. “And water.”

“No water,” grins BeeTee.

“Two, then,” says Ren, without missing a beat.

Armitage can feel BeeTee’s horrible and frankly extraneous third eye watching him as he pours their drinks; Ren’s familiar bulk by his side is horrendously unsettling. It feels vaguely as if he is watching a nightmare his own brain has concocted in the depths of a whiskey-fueled and anxious sleep: reconciling something from a life he has been trying to forget with the space of his current miserable existence. It doesn’t, he thinks. _It doesn’t belong_.

Ren slides a full tumbler of whiskey towards Armitage with one large gloved palm, and then pushes off from the bar, his own glass in hand.

“Put it on my tab,” Armitage growls at BeeTee, and turns to follow.

Ren walks with purpose, as if this is a space he is _accustomed_ to, towards the back of the cantina, where there is a small and empty booth under a cracked awning of vinyl. The meagre crowd of Forks denizens and wayward day-farers part in front of him as if they don’t even realize their own actions. 

“Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?” he hisses, shoving a Sullustan aside with the jab of his elbow, ducking his head to try and get Ren’s attention.

Ren doesn’t even blink; hardly turns his head in Armitage’s direction as he slides into the booth. “I’m here to find you,” he says.

“That was your ship,” Armitage says: accusing, harsh, despite the fact that it’s obvious. “The Upsilon.”

Ren is silent; his expression still infuriatingly implacable. He sets his own glass down in front of him, crosses his arms. 

“Sit,” he says. “You’re swaying.”

“You were watching me,” says Armitage, as he manages to get himself seated across the table from Ren.

“Yes,” says Ren.

“The stunt with the hyperdrive,” he says. “So you could make sure it was me? Get close enough without revealing your position in case you were wrong.”

Ren dips his chin. 

_Just so_ , thinks Armitage, and tips his glass to his mouth to quell the anxious knot in his throat. _And here I am on low ground_ , he thinks. _No exits, bad vantage points_. _Sight-lines limited_. _Cornered_.

“And where have _you_ been?” He digs in his trouser pocket and pulls out a crumpled packet, finds half of a cigarra inside, lights it. His hands are shaking.

“Training,” says Ren.

“And now?”

“It’s over,” says Ren.

“Congratulations,” says Armitage, trying to convey through his tone just how little he actually means it. The exhale of smoke is bitter against his tongue.

“This station,” says Ren. “No one knows who you are.”

“No one _believes_ me. I hope you didn’t ask around.”

Ren’s mouth twitches. “Most people seem to think you’re dead.”

“I’ve heard,” he says, feeling the pressure start to gather against his temples. He hasn’t spoken this much in _weeks_ , he’s either too drunk or not drunk enough, and _Kylo Ren_ is staring at him from across the width of a cantina table like he’s waiting for a fucking _cue,_ as if Armitage would have any fucking idea as to why this would be happening to him. “It’s been. Convenient.”

“Convenient,” Ren echoes, like he might not understand.

“Convenient in terms of not being murdered in my sleep, yes.”

“Why would you worry about that.”

“I destroyed the Hosnian system,” he says, feeling the involuntary bit of pride puffing at the inside of his ribs. Punctuates it with a jab of the cigarra stub in Ren’s direction. “Five _planets_.”

“That was a long time ago,” says Ren.

“I think you’ll find that Galactic history has a far longer memory than one patricidal failed Jedi,” he says, nastily, raising his empty glass meaningfully at BeeTee, from across the room. His ears are ringing.

Something flickers darkly in Ren’s expression, a sharpness settles in his gaze. “That bothers you,” he says.

“ _What_ bothers me?” Armitage mutters, as BeeTee sidles up to the table to refill his glass. He grinds out the cigarra in an old discarded tin bowl. “Leave the bottle.”

“Can he pay for it?” asks BeeTee, holding it just out of arm’s reach.

“Can you pay for it?” Armitage snaps, feeling the heat gather, prickling under his cheeks.

“I can pay for it,” says Ren.

“Good,” he says, sharply, snatching the bottle. “Fine. Piss off.”

“It bothers you,” Ren says, again, once BeeTee is gone. “Being forgotten.”

“Not if it saves my life,” he growls, tipping the bottle over to refill his glass. He ignores Ren’s, which is still full. 

“You’re not a survivalist,” Ren says, as if he _knows_ him. It sounds––troublingly––vaguely fond, for all that that might be the whiskey buzzing in Armitage’s veins. “The commander goes down with the ship.”

“How do I know _you’re_ not here to kill me?” he says, as if to prove him wrong.

“You don’t,” says Ren. “But I don’t really think you’d mind if I was.”

“Fuck off,” he says, eloquently.

Ren lifts his shoulders in the shadow of a shrug.

“Who sent you?” Armitage knocks back his glass; it takes like sour oil when it mingles with the bile in the back of his throat.

“Why do you think anyone sent me?”

He glares. “You’re deflecting.”

“Deflecting?”

“You’re answering my questions with more questions.”

“Who do you think sent me?” says Ren.

“Snoke,” he says, even as it makes something unpleasant and hot tingle up the back of his skull. “Sn—the Supreme Leader sent you. To find me.”

Ren tilts his head, minutely, as if in agreement. 

“Why did he send you?” He watches the tremor in his own hand when he tips the bottle again to refill his glass one more time. Some of the whiskey splashes from the sloppy pour; he sucks it from his knuckles. “Is this––has he reconsidered?”

“It would seem that way,” says Ren, who is still watching him with that same placidly intense sort of focus. His gaze follows, a minute flicker, when Armitage pulls his hand from his mouth and grabs at the glass.

“He didn’t tell you?”

“What would he tell me,” says Ren.

“Have you been living inside a kriffing singularity?” he spits.

“Maybe,” says Ren.

Armitage wants to choke him. He settles for swallowing another mouthful of whiskey and frowning down at the dirt and grease on his hands, inscribed deep under his fingernails. 

“He would have told you,” he says, finally. “I was––exiled. Punishment. For the loss of _Starkiller_.”

“Exile,” says Ren.

“I delivered you. To him,” he says, into his glass. Ren’s steady gaze is making him agitated, voluble. It feels _strange_ to have the opportunity to explain himself. “Pickling in bacta. Mostly whole.”

“He ordered you to,” says Ren. He’s been told this part, Armitage reasons.

“Yes,” he says, bitterness on his tongue. “One last little errand. And then—” 

He opens a fist, palm face up on the table: _poof_. 

“What did he say,” asks Ren. 

Armitage tries not to flinch. Snoke’s horrible shrivelled mouth curling around the words. _You have clearly reached the limits of your usefulness, General._ His shrunken shoulders heaving with distaste. The moment that Armitage felt his own free will seizing up in his chest. Waking up in the lifepod: alone and cold—and frightened.

“I’m sure you can imagine,” he says, instead.

“The Supreme Leader is—” says Ren. 

“—wise,” says Armitage. “Yes.”

Ren tilts his head again: a vague incline of ascent.

“The loss of _Starkiller_ was. Unforgivable.” Armitage finishes the thin film of alcohol still clinging to the glass in a short swallow. “In a way, I suppose I was pardoned. He could have killed me instead.”

“Yes,” says Ren.

“He _should_ have killed me,” he says. It’s out of his mouth before he knows it.

Ren is silent. 

"Why he _didn't_ just put me out of my misery—” He’s drunk, he knows. He knows he should stop talking. He should sucker-punch Ren while his guard is down and make an undignified exit to save his own skin from whatever ill will is strapped to Ren’s side, or curled in his fists. He should watch his mouth. He should stop. But he doesn’t. His tongue is loose, fuzzy. His mind is buzzing, unsteadily. He refills his glass. "Instead of _this_ —cutting me loose like a hunk of rusted-out droids, I’ll never understand."

"You could have done that yourself," says Ren, still watching him calmly from across the table with eyes that seem to swallow up and dull out all the flickering, gummy light of the cantina.

He snorts, despite the cold prickle of fear gathering at the base of his spine. "Shoving a blaster in one's mouth is _cowardly_ , hardly befitting of an officer."

Ren regards him, and Armitage can feel (like a weak echo of the shudder of an engine through the metal sheath of a corridor), something pushing, not aggressively, but firmly, around the edges of his nerves. He feels it find, rather too easily, the place where the cold bit of terror has knotted and scarred, feels it circle round the whole of it, pressing against its sharp little ridges, running spectral currents through the sad, small mass of it, and then––gone. 

The emptiness of it, Armitage realizes, is _terrible._ Hot and suffocating. He drops his gaze, feels his pulse hammering in his own throat. 

"You tried it, though," says Ren, finally.

_You pathetic, weak, little—_ he thinks. The words bubble like rotten yeast at the back of his brain.

“Tried what,” he snaps, clamping down on it.

Ren stares at him. 

“What,” he hisses.

Ren tilts his head, slowly. 

Unbidden, that strange probing feeling again. There is the bleary, unsteady memory of the sensation of the weight of it in his too-warm and sweating palm, the cold metal against his chin, barrel scraping against his teeth. Armitage grimaces, feeling it corrode his jaw like hot vinegar, and downs the rest of his glass in one, long swallow, to push down on the swell of nausea.

"It jammed,” he says. 

“Lucky,” says Ren, unfolding his arms like an exhale, his elbows rest lightly on the edge of the table, palms flat.

“For whom, exactly?” 

Ren points at the middle of his own forehead, and for a wild moment, Armitage thinks, _Is he_ —but instead, Ren says: “The mind that built _Starkiller_ , still in one piece. That’s bound to be lucky for someone.” 

“Then you’ve been speaking to different someones than I have.” Armitage squints at him.

Ren sighs: a pointed little show of emotion, finally. Something approaching exasperation. He leans in, and pushes his own full glass across the table towards Armitage. “You used to keep most of that inside.”

“Most of—what the fuck are you talking about?” Armitage sneers, snatching the glass and sucking it down like he isn’t grateful to be offered the opportunity to obliterate himself further.

“All this self-doubt,” says Ren. “The General Hux that I knew had a handle on that.”

“Haven’t you heard?” He’s slurring, rueful. “The _General_ is dead.”

“Well, then,” murmurs Kylo Ren. He tips a hand over on the table in the echo of a toast: one big and leather-clad palm extended to the sky. “Long live the General.”

Armitage laughs. He thinks, later, he must have laughed. It was all too fucking funny not to, after all.

\--

It is always the same at first, but always a little different, at the end. 

This time, he is in the warm and stifling room with his father. He is on the bridge, but he is in the warm and stifling room, with his father. The walls are weak membranes. They keep shifting, melting. Outside, the world is ending.

His father has something in his hand.

“What is that?” he asks.

“What is _that_?” his father asks.

He looks down. There is a blaster in his hand. There is a blaster in his father’s hand.

“ _Weakness_ ,” says his father. And outside, the world is ending. Burbles of hot rock spinning in the air, fire in the atmosphere, the ground underneath them heaving with the shudders of its own dissolution. Streaks of red in the sky. Ribbons of hot light, and the trembling of gravity as it is parted. “ _Pride_. Make your own deck. Pick your own pieces, carefully, and the game will always go in your favor.” 

The blaster is hot in his hand; it burns his palm. It feels as if his skin is searing black, crumbling, a _rigor mortis_ clench binds his fingers.

“Junior,” says his father. The soft bloom of wine on his lips has grown thick. Smeared, red. It drips down his chin. “What have you lost?”

“Everything,” he says.

His father laughs, and slides the barrel of the blaster inside his own mouth.

He thinks he is screaming, when his vision goes red. But it is just the sound that the universe makes when something inside of it has died.

\--

He wakes up choking on his own spit. His head throbs like it is split open, pain pouring down his temples like scalding water. His whole body is thick, and heavy, and slow; limbs weak with the pressure of gravity, lungs aching with the act of breathing. The air in his pod is overly warm and stifling. He kicks his legs weakly, enough to get the heavy wool of his now threadbare greatcoat shoved to the foot of the cot. He doesn’t remember crawling underneath it last night. He thought he’d stopped that habit once he realized it felt a little like an invalid’s proxy: a pale comfort not worth clinging to.

He groans, rolls over: drools a little onto the thin pillow while he tries to piece together the quality of his own existence. Nothing really hurts, except his head. No flaking copper against his lips, or sliding like bile down the back of his throat. No fighting, then, at least. He sighs, rubs a fist against his closed eyes. No fighting, but plenty of whiskey, apparently. He knows by now the telltale staleness of his own mouth, but he doesn’t remember anything after—

“Do you always dream about the death of _Starkiller_?”

He jerks his head up; the sudden movement send a reeling spike of vertigo through of his body, and he sees stars, for a moment, before his eyes can focus. 

Kylo Ren is in his pod. Leaning back in the single chair with his heavy boots propped up in front of him on the console deck, calmly consuming the last few bites of a Balosorian tree-apple. His gloves are gone, the sleeves of his loose tunic pushed up to his elbows, his hair still pulled back from his pale, bisected face. 

“Oh _hells_ ,” croaks Armitage. “You’re real.”

Ren watches him, chewing.

“How did you get _in_ here.” Armitage pulls himself upright; finds he is naked from the waist-up. He casts around for his pack of cigarras as a cover for the discomfort, the sudden self-consciousness, finds it on the ground—empty. He tosses it against the far wall in disgust, disappointment. 

“You let me in,” says Ren.

“I did not,” says Armitage. 

“You were drunk,” says Ren. 

“Have you been _watching me sleep_?”

“Was that your father?”

“Wha—” Armitage chokes. He wants to _vomit_.

“On _Starkiller_ ,” says Ren. “In your dream. Was that your father?”

“None of your business,” Armitage hisses. “What do you mean, _I let you in.”_

“You let me in,” says Ren, tossing the core of the fruit on the floor. “You were drunk and the three-eyed man told me where you slept, and I brought you back here, and you let me in.”

“Oh my god,” says Armitage, pressing his face into his hands. 

“You were sick,” says Ren. “By the way. I cleaned it up.”

“Go away,” says Armitage. “Just. Go away.”

“No,” says Ren. “We have to talk.”

“We talked,” says Armitage. “Last night. Didn’t we? Where is my _shirt_.”

Ren points to the foot of the cot, where there is a sadly wrinkled pile of gray fabric peeking out from the folds of his old greatcoat. “You don’t remember last night,” he says.

“I remember.” He glares at Ren when he manages to tug his shirt over his head, fisting the hem of it in his clammy palms, tugging downward. It smells ripe and sour; his whole body feels grimy and slick with stale sweat. Ren’s white, clean face and neat black tunic are an _affront_. 

“You don’t,” says Ren. “And we’re not finished.”

“I know I didn’t make _you_ any promises,” he says. “And I know you barely gave me an explanation.”

Ren shifts in the console seat, unfolding his long legs and setting both feet back on the floor. He leans forward, bracing an elbow on his each knee, fingers knit together in the space between his legs. 

“You don’t need an explanation,” he says, finally. “You need to come with me.”

“And go where, exactly?” Armitage ignores the fact that Ren’s large and ungloved hands have the remnants of raw-pink scrapes along the knuckles. 

“Back,” says Ren. “Home.”

“Home?” Armitage spits. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“No,” says Ren. 

Armitage ignores him, shoving to his feet unsteadily and crossing the short distance to the far end of the pod, where his meagre belongings are stacked in an ungainly pile, his boots tipped against them, for once nearly lined up, as if someone has placed them there with a certain and unfamiliar amount of care. He shoves them on, grabs his blaster and holster next.

“Why are you still here?” Ren’s brow is pinched, when Armitage turns to face him again.

“What kind of a question is that?” Armitage tosses the blaster onto the cot, straps his holster belt to his waist, and pins Ren with what he hopes is a penetrating and steely glare. “I’m here because I’m _here_. It’s not as if I was given a choice.” 

“You could have gone anywhere.”

He snorts. “I don’t know who told you that, but they were lying to you.”

“No one told me that,” says Ren. “I don’t understand why you’re being so difficult.”

_Difficult_. Armitage sneers. What would Ren know, he thinks, of _difficulty_. 

“I’m not going to sit here and explain it to you,” he says, shortly. “I have to go to work.”

“Work,” repeats Ren.

“Right, of course,” he mutters. “I’d forgotten how ignorant you are of the general concept.” 

“You don’t have to go to _work_ ,” says Ren. “You’re the Hosnian Harbinger.”

“Heard that one, have you?” 

Ren shrugs. 

“Not my personal favorite,” he mutters, mostly to himself. He fishes in his pockets, looking for a few spare credits for a cup of caf, and finds them empty, as per usual. His headache throbs at his temples, as if pestering him for still _talking_.

“You're—” Ren starts.

“Stop,” he rounds on him. “Spare me the morale booster and I'll save you the trouble of finding out it’s not going to help. I'm leaving, now, for _work_. You can do whatever you please, besides staying here.”

Ren stares at him, for one long moment more, before getting heavily to his feet and crossing his arms over his chest. He jerks his chin up, just once, as if to say: _after you_.

Armitage huffs, turns and heaves the door open; Ren at his heels. Everything about him, from his interminable and particularly chosen silences to his apparently new-found serenity to his large, pale forearms to his _stupid_ hair knotted on the back of his skull to his invasive, insisting _existence_ —it makes Armitage nauseously angry at being forced to endure the constant insult of it all. 

When they are almost to the shipbay, Armitage pulls up short.

“Shit,” he mutters, hand going to his empty blaster holster.

“What?” Ren hovers behind him, a half-second from colliding with Armitage’s back.

Armitage pulls a face, gestures at his holster belt. “I’ve forgotten—” 

He can picture it, lying where he’d tossed it earlier on his meagre cot in the dark of his lifepod.

“You don’t need it,” says Ren.

“You don’t know that,” Armitage glares.

“I’m here,” says Ren. 

“Wonderful,” he says, with all the abrasive sarcasm he can muster.

Chumma is standing in the middle of the bay when they arrive, holding a comically outsized datapad in its tiny arms. It waves at Armitage, from across the room, and hands him the customary handful of white analgesics when they approach. Armitage can feel Ren’s eyes on him still as he swallows them down dry: feeling sour and begrudging at having the intimacy of his pathetic _routine_ on view. 

Chumma spares barely a glancing look in Ren’s direction before handing Armitage the datapad, which is heavily over-used and barely functional, the screen shattered and the metal backing stained and rusted. 

“Your friend,” it says. “Still here, eh?”

“Not my friend,” says Armitage, squinting at the order list. “Why didn’t you get the plasma stretchers? We were running low last week.”

“You make him so jumpy,” says Chumma, ignoring Armitage. “What’s your name, General’s friend?”

“Solo,” says Ren.

Armitage’s head jerks up before he can stop himself, panic sticking in his throat.

Chumma just laughs: high-pitched and jarring. “Good one. Like the Han Solo, yes? Very cute—nice joke. He’s all right, General, you can have him hang around.”

“I don’t _want_ him to hang around,” says Armitage, still warily watching Ren’s placid profile.

“How's the hyperdrive,” says Chumma, knowingly, squinting up at Ren.

“Good as new,” says Ren. 

Chumma’s thin lips curl upward in a smirk. 

“Come on,” it says, to Armitage. “Salvage job, today. It’s a good one.”

\--

It’s a Zhoraline shuttle: nearly a decade old, and apparently towed in by a trio of mostly silent and unsavory smuggler-types looking for a third-share-minus-labor of whatever Chumma and Armitage could pull working and of value from its innards.

“Told them three days’ work,” Chumma had said, while it showed him the hulking mass of it shoved ungainly into the tow-bay. 

“We can do it faster,” he’d said.

“They don't know that,” Chumma had grinned, thinly. “Also they don't know what _you_ know about Zhoraline fuse-snap coils, do they.”

Chumma, as usual, wasn't wrong.

Together, they shear off one of the wings from the hull, laz-cutters spitting, and drag it with the help of a floater-palette to the far end of the salvage bay, so Armitage can start to pull the plating away to expose the fuse network underneath. Chumma leaves him to it, returning to the hull to do more nimble-fingered work, while Ren watches, silently, from where he’s sat on a low stack of empty transport containers, his eyes half-closed and his posture hunched. 

Armitage ignores him. Ignores him while he unbolts the wing plating, pulling it free sheet by sheet, tossing it onto a growing pile on the ground beside the severed wing. Ignores him while he goes elbow-deep into the innards of the dead shuttle. Ignores him when he shoves a flashlight between his teeth to illuminate the delicate snapping of connectors, collecting the salvaged fuses carefully on the tip of the wing. Ignores him while he tugs his goggles off to wipe the sweat from his face. Ignores him when he dumps the disconnected fuse components into an empty techkit and slings it over his back so he can clamber up the catwalk ladder to clean them. Ignores him while he crouches there, meticulously running the spinning end of a thrum-sander over the casings, oil and rust coming away on his fingers, his wrists, the metal floor.

Ignores him until, maybe an hour later, he hears Ren’s heavy footfalls on the catwalk behind him. When he glances over his shoulder, Ren is holding two small and steaming white dispo-foam bowls, one in each hand. 

“ _Solo_ ,” he says, pointedly. “Really.”

Ren doesn’t even flinch. “The alien said it was time for you to eat,” is all he says.

“This is your plan,” says Armitage, accepting the bowl that Ren holds out to him and scooting gingerly to the edge of the catwalk so he can swing his legs out over the edge and set the dish in his lap. “Haunting me until I cave?”

Ren sits next to him, heavily, holding his own bowl awkwardly above his thighs. “I don’t have a plan,” he says.

Armitage snorts, snapping open the thin utensils strapped to the side of the dish, fishing around in the broth for something edible. “Typical.”

“Didn’t think I would need one,” Ren says, chewing. 

It sounds vaguely petulant. For the first time, it sounds _familiar_ to Armitage in the way that the cadence of it sends him reeling back to Snoke’s holochambers, to a conference room on the Finalizer, to a corridor outside an interrogation room: _years_ spent bickering and denying each other the little pleasures of camaraderie, of shared resources, shared goals, basic fundamental _agreement_ , on anything.

Armitage huffs, shoving an unidentifiable piece of slick and soggy vegetation into his mouth rather than responding. It tastes weak and watery; the shame of his brief flicker of _useless_ nostalgia makes his cheeks a little hot. He tips the bowl, sucks some broth from the rim of the bowl, to try and burn it away.

“Why don’t you want to come with me?” says Ren.

“I don’t trust you,” he says, stabbing at a greasy noodle at the bottom of his bowl instead of glancing at Ren’s profile.

“That’s not it,” says Ren.

He abandons the noodle, letting his utensils slip into the oily broth. “ _Fine_ ,” he says, sharply. “What is it, then.”

“You’re embarrassed,” says Ren, who when Armitage does chance a look at him is poking carefully at a sad, wilted looking piece of vegetable that may have at one point been green but is now yellowed and blanched-limp. “You’re frightened.”

“Stop that,” he says.

“What?”

“Pretending like you _know_ what I’m—” he swallows. “I’m not _frightened_.”

Ren shrugs, chewing. His gaze is still fixed on the broken shuttle wing below them.

“He sent his _pet_ to retrieve me,” says Armitage. “And I’m supposed to tuck my tail between my legs and follow you wherever you tell me to? _I’m_ supposed to be grateful?”

Ren turns his head, meeting Armitage’s eyes. “I’m not Snoke,” he says.

“You’re speaking for him,” Armitage says, prickly.

“What if I wasn’t?” says Ren, setting his bowl aside. “What if _I_ asked you to come with me?”

Armitage snorts.

“Hux,” says Ren. “Answer the question.”

“Oh, _make_ me,” he snaps. “If this is really so important to you, just wave your hand and mitigate the nasty little frustration of my own free will.”

“I could,” says Ren. “I could make you.”

“So do it,” Armitage challenges, meeting Ren’s gaze with what he hopes is a kind of icy rigidity, pulling his spine up straight, as if he isn’t sitting on the edge of a crumbling catwalk with tech goggles strapped to his greasy hair, with rust streaked on his arms and laz-spatter flecked on his cheeks and his unkempt beard, unshowered and _aching_ for a drink.

Ren shrugs. “I’m not going to,” he says.

Armitage narrows his eyes. “This is a test.”

Ren is silent.

“Some kind of perverse test the two of you have drummed up, isn’t it?” he continues. “Devised to—what? Probe my loyalty? Break me just to build me back up again? Get me to _beg_ for it?”

Something dark and heated flashes in Ren’s expression. His mouth tightens. His jaw works, as if he’s clenching his teeth. 

Armitage sneers, feeling a flush creep hotly up his face. “That’s it. Your thinly disguised little game.” He tears his gaze away, throws his mostly empty bowl to the metal of the catwalk beside him; the broth sloshes thickly up against the sides. He feels nausea coiling upwards in his gut. “I won’t have it. I meant it. I don’t trust you, and—and I don’t trust _him_.”

He feels Ren’s eyes on him, an uncomfortable drilling pressure. The weight of it, the truth of what he’s just blurted in disoriented, unstable anger—it feels dangerous. 

“You don’t trust him,” Ren repeats. Flat and even. Slow, like he is learning a foreign language by ear.

“You heard me,” he says. 

“Why not,” says Ren.

“Piss off,” he says.

“Hux,” says Ren.

“Would _you_?” Armitage snaps, dragging his eyes up to meet Ren’s gaze again. 

Ren stares at him, expression fierce. His eyes flash again, searching, the usual soft, expressive bow of his mouth stretched to a flat, terse line. There is the faint bloom of pinking high on his cheeks; it makes him look vaguely feverish, half-wild. Just the slightest change in his coloring, and Armitage finds himself helpless not to remember what it was like to find him struck-down in the hissing, violently melting snow: gasping and bleeding and keening into the wind.

“Oi!” Chumma’s squeaking, thin wheeze of a voice cuts through the thick air between them. “General! Come on—work! I need your big floppy human hands to open this valve.”

“I’m going,” Armitage says, scraping to his feet and snapping his goggles back over his eyes, his face tingling with the flush of anger and shame and—something unfamiliar and tight brought on by the intensity of Ren’s glare. “And you and your _mission_ can get karked. I mean it—I don’t care if I ever see you again.” 

He turns and clambers down the catwalk ladder, limbs tense and spine aching. He snatches the valve pliers from Chumma’s spindly fingers with enough force to send the little alien rocking back on its heels. 

“Oi—” starts Chumma.

“Shut up,” Armitage snaps, stomping heavily over to the half-stripped hull of the shuttle. “Hold the stabilizers.”

He nearly pulls the valve crank clean off, with all the force he puts behind opening it. It feels—for all the aching in his shoulders and the sudden unkind pull of an abused tendon in his forearm— _good_ , to have something inanimate and unprotesting to tear apart with his bare hands.

(And much later still, when he looks up to the catwalk in a moment of weakness, a fistful of rusted-out console components in each hand, Ren is gone.)

\--

For a while, it was all he thought about. Replayed it over and over inside his own skull while seething and staring at the ceiling of the lifepod, glaring at the scratched surface of the cantina bar, frowning at his own increasingly grimy reflection in the shared refreshers. How it could have happened. How it all could have come crashing down, as easily and softly as it did, like a flower petal wilting in front of him. 

He’d traced the steps, backwards and forwards. The pilot, the traitor, the droid, the girl. The perverse bandyings of power, his attempts to salvage favor, to have his voice be heard. Tactic changes. The weapon. That brief glimpse of his destiny fulfilled, singed red at the edges and crackling through the universe like a golden arrow, splitting the blackness open and letting him see, even just for a _moment_ , what his future could have been. 

“Where's your friend, Commandant?” says BeeTee, now, when he comes up to refills Armitage’s glass.

Armitage spits on the floor.

_Ren._

It was always Ren. Every single glint of culpability, every slip-up, every glaring misjudgment and slithering scale of interference: they had all been _Ren’s_. He himself had performed admirably. Had followed orders. Had maintained whatever vestiges of control he could wrangle from the chaotic tangle Ren seemed to leave in his wake.

He had stopped thinking about it, after a few months. He couldn't reconcile it. Couldn’t find a way to balance the weight of his rage with the way he had felt looking into the shimmering column of the bacta tank, the way he had felt finding Ren in the snow, stained black with bleeding and wild-eyed, babbling hoarse nonsense.

_Shut up_ , he had hissed, into the scream of the dying planet, the whipping howl of the storm. 

_I did it,_ Ren had raged at him, clawing at the back of Armitage’s neck with numb, bloodied hands. _I did it_.

Armitage had struck him. He’d grabbed Ren by what was left by the collar of his robe, and slapped him with the flat of his freezing palm. Ren had sobbed, just once. An animal cry lost to the shrieking air. 

Pity. He had felt that. And bloodlust too, and carnality, and sorrow, and loss, and desperation, and then he was _flung_ aside. Left to knit these open sores back together _by himself_ , when it was all Ren’s fault, and only Ren who would have understood any of it. 

And so he had stopped thinking about it. Let it drift off to burrow quiet and wounded into some darker place of his own heart where it could starve to death for all he cared. Replaced it with the softer shames of failure and exile. Memories of Snoke’s voice echoing in his aching head. The cold air of the lifepod drifting in space. Because it had just hurt too much: the realization that at the end of it all, he had been denied his solace too, along with everything else.

He drains his glass. Throws three credits down on the bar; stumbles to his feet, craving sleep and the simple clarity of bad dreams.

\--

When he stumbles back into his lifepod, Ren is there. Hunched in the console chair like a growing shadow Armitage can’t seem to shake. 

“Why haven’t you left yet,” he says. He means it to be short, dismissive; it’s slurred, instead.

Ren doesn’t turn to look at him. He’s turning Armitage’s blaster over and over in his hands, against his lap. It looks meagre and weak in Ren’s large paws, like it could be snapped in half.

“Leave that alone.” He thinks about reaching for it, snatching it out of Ren’s fingers, but his own limbs feel swimmy and weak. “It’s not—it’s not yours.”

“You’re drunk,” says Ren, head turned now just slightly in Armitage’s direction.

“So?” Armitage sniffs. 

“This is disgraceful,” Ren says. “Look at you.”

“What—” he tries to pull himself up, but ends up swaying; he catches himself on the nearest curved wall of the lifepod.

Ren is on his feet in one smooth motion, tossing the blaster to the top of the console. His eyes, in Armitage’s blurred vision, look a pure and sucking black.

“Look at you,” says Ren, again.

“F-fuck off,” Armitage slurs, and tries to push past him. He just wants to _sleep_.

Ren catches him at the bicep with a powerful vice grip, and Armitage panics: he shoves at him, stumbling backward in the process and steadying himself on the arm of the console chair.

“Look at you,” says Ren, one more time. His face is pale and hard and the line of his mouth is wet and cruel. “What would your _officers_ say if they could see you like this?”

Armitage’s heart-rate leaps before he can muster any kind of retort: something thick and heavy plummets into the pit of his stomach, his skin goes cold, his own mouth tastes sour. He tries to snarl; only a hoarse and uneven noise comes out of him.

“Filthy,” says Ren. Lilting, like a lullaby. “Unshaven. Broke and begging for scraps. Crawling under other people’s ships to salvage enough credits so you can get yourself from one bottle to the next? _Wallowing_ in your own self-pity.”

“You fucki—”

“Why are you even still trying?” Ren says, quietly. 

“Wha—”

“Maybe you’ll have better luck the second time you want to swallow your own blaster.”

“Get out,” he chokes. “ _Out_.”

“No,” Ren growls, advancing. The radiating energy from his body, the _disgust_ in his eyes is a physical force. Armitage stumbles, when his ankle catches on the edge of the console chair; he braces himself against the control panel behind him, feels the cold edge of it digging into the backs of his thighs. 

“You don’t command me,” say Ren. “You can’t tell anyone what to do anymore. There isn’t a single organism in the entire universe that would listen to you now. And why would they? You couldn’t even commit to _giving up_.”

He’s standing in Armitage’s space, less than a foot away; Armitage could reach out with both hands and shove him in the chest again, but he can’t––he can’t move, he feels trapped, contained, _diminished_. There is a thick coating of bile building along the back of his throat, his face is on _fire_ , his pulse racing.

Ren picks up Armitage’s blaster from where it’s been discarded on top of the console. He holds it in his hand for a moment, regarding it like perhaps it is a grimy, pitiful extension of Armitage’s own filthy body.

“Go on,” says Ren, turning it in his fingers, extending it towards Armitage in the meagre space between their bodies. The barrel of it is almost pressed against Ren’s stomach, the grip extended towards Armitage’s ribs. “I want to see you try not to fail at this too.”

He remembers the last time. There is a hot stinging behind his eyes, like before. Like before, he can feel something thick and obstructive in his throat, every inhale like a burning gulp of suffocating, toxic air. On the edge of his cot, the blaster held between his palms, his elbows on his knees, his head bent between his shoulders. Reeling, drunk, _obliterated_. He had just been sick outside in the corridor. There had been vomit drying on the front of his shirt. That morning he had gambled for a hand of seventeen credits with his father’s cufflinks, and lost, pathetically, to a stinking wet-lipped half-breed. 

He had wanted to die. 

He had wanted to die on _Starkiller_ , wanted to be absorbed into the scarlet infinite of the universe, to be consumed by the astral expulsion of matter, the ultimate ascension into perpetuity, to be forever sublimated as energy from the galaxy’s greatest weapon, the fearsome child of his own making swallowing him back up into the great, gaping, maw of its event horizon.

He had tasted the metal of the blaster against the flat of his tongue: sour and bright. He had closed his eyes and tried to think of a crimson wave of light. Instead, he had seen a field of snow. 

His wet-eyed, shaking, paralytic silence is his refusal. Ren is correct: he is a _disgrace_. He blinks, drops his gaze. 

“Coward,” says Ren. 

“Get fucked,” he says. (His voice breaks. It sounds so _weak_.)

Ren tosses the blaster to the ground, like it is a soiled rag. 

“Why would Snoke even want you like this?” He says. His lip curls like a snarl; he flicks a hand dismissively, tightly, in Armitage’s direction. His knuckles graze Armitage’s sternum.

“ _Out_ ,” chokes Armitage. 

Ren goes. The door slams behind him.

In the ringing silence, Armitage hiccoughs once. Wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. Leaves the blaster where it lies on the floor, when he finally crawls onto the cot and closes his eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

Behind his father’s shoulder, there is a wide transparisteel expanse. Three long windows out onto the spacescape below: a planet whirls by like a spun top. Stars turn too quickly: a flicker of hyperspace in the left quadrant of his vision. The whole thing judders momentarily into static, like a failing console screen. A naked lightbulb swings over his head like a pendulum.

“Junior,” his father says.

“Yes,” he says. 

He is watching the long, slow spray of an explosion, behind his father’s shoulder. It is red, and orange, and very black, and there is no sound, but he can feel through his body the elastic rupture of the sphere of a planet: the rumbling creaking wailing violence of a mass coming apart at the edges of its gravity.

“Armitage,” his father says.

“Yes,” he says.

The lightbulb sways: makes a long, arcing pass around the ceiling of the room like a scythe.

“Who is that?” his father asks, turning to the window.

“No one,” he says. “It’s no one, don’t look.”

The lightbulb circles faster, a rotor blade of shadows. Outside the windows, the explosion is closer: it has fractured into dark mountains and white peaks and chasms of fire, and he is watching himself struggle along the edge of a widening precipice, ground unsteady under his feet, and ash spiralling upwards into the air around him.

“Don’t look,” he says again. It is not the thing he means to say, but there is a large stone wedged between his ribs and he cannot speak the other words.

His father waves him off and steps out the window into the storm. Armitage screams at him, but there is ash in his mouth: he is choking on it as it coats his tongue and his throat and his lungs and the stone inside his chest. His father disappears into the whirl of fire and white-grey wind, and he is watching himself follow into the quaking forest beyond, great spikes of black wood shuddering up from the splitting earth like the teeth of some mammoth beast attempting to chew its way to freedom from the inside-out.

The ash on his face is cold. White. He watches himself hold out a hand, open palm collecting flakes of it, where it melts like sizzling meat. It is coating his hair. Sticking to his skull. He watches the wind whip around himself, in the distance, a black smudge besieged by a sudden curtain of pale flurrying crystals. 

There are lightbulbs in the trees. Hanging from the trembling branches like cracked conifer seeds. He reaches up to touch one and it shatters in his hand. There is a shard in his palm, blood running down his wrist, but he can’t seem to feel the pain. When he pulls the shard free, it dissolves into ash, into snow.

The earth lurches underneath him and he stumbles, falls to his knees in the ice, watches himself across the clearing where he is bending over a crumpled, shivering wounded animal with dark fur gone wet with blood and melted snow, steam rising off its heaving chest. Watches as he reaches out an ungloved hand in the distance between his own body and the animal.

_Stop_ , he wants to say. The scream is stuck in his throat again, because of the ash and the stone and the shard of glass. _Don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it._

The animal snarls, bares its teeth. It has Ren’s face. It is Ren, the animal. He is the color of snow-white ash and there is a smear of thick dark red wine bisecting his face, like someone has marked him there with shaking fingers, like some kind of battle mask, warrior paint.

Ren is screaming, but he can’t make out what the words are. Somewhere, in the distant crumbling forest there is the sound of a blast-shot, the tinkling shatter of glass, there is the rumbling roar of the earth still splitting underneath their bodies. 

“Don’t look,” he says.

Ren laughs. It sounds like grinding stone. 

He is flailing, arms wild and legs kicking against some enemy Armitage cannot see. When he reaches out to stop it, Ren’s hands are on him, like claws. They are cold. They grip his face. His own palm is stuck to Ren’s cheek: fused there, hissing, melting like soldered metal. There is a screaming noise: rhythmic and driving. It is their heartbeats, screeching with the force of their joining. Ren’s mouth opens in a silent, gaping wail. His sharpened teeth stretch long and then shatter like glass shards; it splits his face in half and further still, until it is just a wide and sucking eddy of blackness, until it swallows Armitage whole. 

\--

His alarm is screaming steadily, when he gasps awake with sweat damp on his back and on his face. His shirt is sticking to his skin, his head is pounding, his mouth is dry with panting. He is alone.

The lifepod is empty. The alarm screeches and screeches and screeches and his pulse is thudding and thudding and thudding in his chest, until he is able to lean over the edge of the cot to find one of his boots and hurl it at the far wall.

The screech whines into silence. He is still panting, his heartbeat still racing. He wipes at his wet face with both hands and slumps back against the thin mattress. Behind his closed eyes, he can still see the whirl of ash-snow, glittering and wheeling; he can feel still the shuddering empty drop of his stomach from when Ren gripped at his face with dead-cold hands.

“Fuck,” he whispers, into his palms.

He’s half-hard. Disoriented. Clammy and warm inside his briefs with a tight and insistent discomfort he hasn’t felt in months— _years_. It doesn’t make _sense_ —to have invested so much energy into dulling the edge of his failure only to have it rear up again so easily.

_Pathetic_ , he thinks, and rolls onto his stomach with a groan.

He shoves a hand down the front of his briefs; half-heartedly cups at the head of his own prick with his sweaty palm. The jolt of pleasure is blazing hot, coiling straight up his spine and making his body curl in on itself, defensively. He hisses, biting down on the pillow underneath his face. His fingers spasm, and the sound that burbles up from his throat is defeated, desperate. He keeps seeing that wide, yawning blackness: the surge of it encompassing him like powerful sucking mouth, and it makes his cock twitch, swelling. 

_Disgusting_ , he thinks, at the same time that he thinks of Ren’s wet, black, open—

He bares his teeth against the damp sheets and tugs at himself again, more roughly now. _Almost_ —his lips part around the edge of a gasp, a hoarse little curse. He’s trying to hang onto the half-lucid, bleary lack of awareness, chasing the edges of his dreaming even as it starts to slip away. The nagging sourness of his own hangover, the sick deviance of his arousal: they grow louder, while the slick bleary space of his arousal starts to fade.

“Fucking—” he hisses. _Fucking—not now._

He snarls, panting open-mouthed now, and gives his prick a cruel twist. It doesn't help. The heat in his face, painting the inside of his belly, his chest—it’s just the duller edge of shame now. There’s a cold, empty space between his ribs, where all that sweet uncaring tightness had been. His prick pulses weakly, in his hand; his fingers loosen. It’s already soft. When he opens his eyes, squinting at the edge of the cot, he’s exactly where he’s always been for the last two years: alone and cold and missing too much to find any solace in the purity of it. 

He tugs his hand from between his legs and punches the thin pillow. Rolls onto his back. His limp cock mocks him when it settles damply against the crook of his thigh. Above him, the single naked lightbulb hangs quiet and unmoving in the dead air.

\--

Chumma doesn’t ask about Ren. Barely spares Armitage a second glance when he skulks into the shipbay alone, under-caffeinated and still aching under his skin. The alien just hands him the customary analgesics, like he does every morning, says a few words about Armitage’s general lackluster appearance, like he does every morning, and points him to the required work, like he does every morning. 

The routine feels sour now. Ruined. He can’t shake the feeling, even as he gets to work on stripping the last remaining usable components from the salvaged shuttle wing, that something has been ruptured loose from the neatly pathetic package of his life. He fears, insanely, that he is wearing it about himself like a putrid stink: his perverse dreaming, his inexplicable anger, his denial. Kylo Ren’s mark on him like a newly re-opened wound: gouged apart and left to leak pus and plasma. Anyone could see it now, soaking through his shirt, his trousers, could follow the smeared droplets trailing after him, like radar trails in the sky. 

_What if I went after him_ , he thinks, suddenly. _What if I left_. 

The thought causes him to almost drop the laz-spanner. His palms are slick with sweat, his heartbeat judders in his chest, and he growls to himself as he pushes the possibility away and bends his head as he goes back to scraping apart the fuse network piece by piece. _He can’t_ , he thinks _._ He won’t. Ren was never here for him. Ren was just the first blade, testing the depth of his fat, the resistance of his bone. 

It’s not _over_. Of course it’s not over. Whatever it is that is wanted of him, whatever Snoke has planned for him, it’s not going to end with Kylo Ren calling him a failure, mocking his own inability to even—well. He shakes his head, as if to clear interference from a malfunctioning comm. He knows that, that it’s not done yet. But it is entirely possible, he thinks, that if he staunches this particular first strike with enough anger and self-preservation, he can survive the bleeding out.

With the hiss of the spanner loud in his ears, he doesn’t hear the footsteps behind him. There’s only a prickle on the nape of his neck, the half-second of sensation that perhaps the atmosphere has been charged with threat, and then the next thing he knows there’s a hand fisted in the back of his shirt collar and he’s being roughly hauled backwards, sent sprawling onto the cold durasteel floor of the bay, laz-spanner and goggles clattering several feet away. He scrambles to his feet, one hand groping for his blaster, but it’s too late—he’s surrounded. 

A circle of heavy boots, red leather, and black plastisteel armor. Ovaline helmets, the low-frequency scraping hum of poorly installed cybernetic limbs. Three behind him, two on either side, and in front of him hoisting the weight of a Tustovin cannon, the predator-black eyes and rodent face of— 

“Bala-Tik,” he says, lip curling on the name. He clenches his jaw, tries to keep his hands steady on the butt of his blaster.

“Remember who I am, do ye?” Bala-Tik shoulders the cannon, cocking his hip. “I’m fucking flattered.”

“Everyone in this puny, hopeless system knows who you are,” says Armitage.

“Ahh,” says Bala-Tik, stepping closer so he can lower his cannon from his shoulder and press the barrel of it against Armitage’s chest. With a chipped-tooth smile, he leans in just enough to slide his fingers over Armitage’s wrist and loosen Armitage’s blaster from his hand. “Ah, ah, ah.”

“General—“ he continues, sliding his hand behind his own back. Armitage watches the telltale movement of the tucking of his blaster into the belt of Bala-Tik’s holster. “—Ye dinna really understand, do ye? The important thing is that only _we_ know who _you_ are.”

“What are you talking about.” His pulse is high, frantic. He takes a long, subtle inhale—tries to regulate the thudding irregularity of it. Clenches his hands at his sides, relaxes them, juts his chin upward. A Guavian enforcer to his left primes their cannon, lifts it mockingly to align the sight at Armitage’s temple. 

“It _is_ General, innit?” Bala-Tik smirks. “General Hux.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard,” he says. “General Hux is dead.”

“ _Really_ ,” Bala-Tik sing-songs. “Yer lookin’ pretty well for a dead man. Bit worn out at the edges, maybe, but I suppose that’s what fallin’ into disgrace will do to a bloke, eh?”

“Oi!”

His head whips around, just in time to see Chumma Blat emerge from the scrapped hull of the Zhoraline shuttle two bays over, a tangle of salvaged plasma tubes still clenched in its long fingers.

“What is this?” Chumma’s big eyes are dilated, shoulders hunched warily. “Who are you?”

“Chumma—” he starts, warning.

“Friend o’ yers?” grins Bala-Tik, and he lifts his cannon and fires.

Chumma’s little body crumples against the side of the shuttle with a sick, flat noise. 

The blaze of the shot stings at the side of Armitage’s face; the noise of it sets his ears ringing. He sucks his teeth, saliva hot in his mouth. 

_Shit_ , he thinks. _Shit, shit._

He’s panicking. It’s been too long since he’s seen a firefight, too long since he’s had to think on his feet. He’s good with his fists, his teeth, but he needs at least four shots of whiskey and at least seven fewer high-powered blaster cannons aimed at his head before he could possibly find any strategy in lashing out, at this point. 

“On yer knees, if you don’t mind, General.” Bala-Tik waves a hand, and one of the enforcers steps forward behind him, shoving the barrel of his cannon against Armitage’s back.

A hand on his shoulder presses him down. It’s _humiliating_ , how easily he goes. How weak his limbs feel, how disgustingly atrophied he finds his own body in this moment: dull and de-bladed and his mind blurry with the remnants of his hangover. He stares, seething, at the cracked floor and tries not to think about Chumma Blat dying behind him, about the lack of exits, about his empty blaster holster, about how no one might ever know that this is how— 

“Where’s Kylo Ren?”

“What?” 

It startles him out of self-pity; his gaze snaps up. _This isn’t_ —he thinks—this isn’t the play he thought was coming.

“Don’t play stupid.” The cannon barrel presses harder against his shoulder blades. Bala-Tik shoulders his own weapon again, saunters closer, circling Armitage. “Won’t do ye any favors when yer about to get a lovely big hole in yer chest. Where’s Kylo Ren?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Armitage growls. His mind is racing.

“We know he’s here.” Bala-Tik leans in beside him, mouth inches Armitage’s ear. “We know he came looking for ye. We also know that was his unmarked shuttle in the other shipbay we just rendered—inoperable. He can’t be far.”

He bites the inside of his own cheek. The glint of pain, faint taste of copper: it does a little to reset the thud of his pulse. 

“The silent treatment won’t get ye very far, General,” says Bala-Tik, stepping back. “Y’know as well as anyone how good we are at getting what we want.”

“Adequate,” says Armitage.

“What?”

“You were,” he says. “Barely adequate. Not _good_.”

Bala-Tik frowns, and makes a subtle gesture with one hand, and the enforcer behind him steps back. The pressure of the cannon barrel on his spine releases, just for a moment, and even though he knows it’s coming, the searing, percussive spike of pain sends him sprawling forward, gasping and disoriented, when the enforcer swings the butt of his weapon into the back of Armitage’s head with a dull _thwack_.

“Ohh, I’d watch that mouth o’ yers,” says Bala-Tik, sighing. 

It sounds dim and watery; his ears are _buzzing_. A hot sting blooms in his skull, down his spine. He tries to right himself, but his balance is off, and someone shoves a boot into the middle of his back, pinning him facedown to the cold durasteel floor.

He clenches his jaw, sucks the drool back into his mouth, and squints into the suddenly too-bright light of the shuttle bay when he feels Bala-Tik approaching again. Through blurred vision, he sees the heavy black boots and the folding of leather-clad calves and thighs when Bala-Tik crouches by his side.

A hand in his hair, tugging upward.

“General,” Bala-Tik croons.

He bares his teeth, tasting blood.

“Y’were always such a prissy little fuck, weren’t ye?” Bala-Tik leans in, breath hot against the side of Armitage’s face. “I’m gonna enjoy this very particularly. Especially if yer invested in continuing to be—difficult.”

He spits.

“One more time,” says Bala-Tik, ignoring him. The fingers in his hair clench harder; his scalp stings. There’s blood running down his temples now, hot and viscous. His ribs ache where the boot is pressed against his lungs. “Where is Kylo Ren?”

_Here_.

It’s very strange, he thinks, in the microsecond of the moment before the screaming starts—was that in his _head_? And then:

“Right here.”

There is the unmistakable, familiar thrumming crackle of Ren’s old weapon. A shout, a scuffling noise, and Armitage’s head is released; his forehead cracks against the floor and he rolls to his back, heaving himself up onto his elbows only to see the exact moment when Kylo Ren leaps from the shadows of the catwalk above and splits an enforcer in two from head to naval.

Bala-Tik shouts something that Armitage can’t make out, and there is the explosion of cannon fire. Something warps, in the air, and Ren whirls with his free arm outstretched: bolts of energy freeze in place, some splitting off harmlessly to ricochet off the far walls of the bay. Ren ducks another blast of fire, and his saber, spitting, cuts one enforcer off at the knees and shears another’s arm off in a spray of cybernetic screeching.

Bala-Tik is on his feet, and Armitage, feeling a righteous burning adrenaline—foreign to him since the moment he stood on the dais of _Starkiller_ — kicks out with one leg and catches Bala-Tik right in the back of his one remaining flesh-and-blood knee with the sole of his boot. 

The other cybernetic leg crumples along with the rest of him, cannon misfiring, and Armitage launches himself at Bala-Tik’s back: he pins him with his lower legs, gets one arm around the Guavian’s neck, and punches him as hard as he can across the weak and unprotected divot of his temple. Bala-Tik’s body jerks, Armitage punches him again, and then releases his neck so he can slam the soft meat of his face into the hard durasteel of the floor. Something wet splatters against his wrists. Bala-Tik’s body goes limp.

He’s breathing hard through his teeth, sucking air like an animal, and when he looks up, he sees the last enforcer go down under Ren’s sputtering blade, skewered through the chest like a wriggling bit of prey. The body falls heavily, armor clanging against the floor. Armitage’s still on his knees over Bala-Tik’s prone back, there’s a pool of blood spreading under the hand he’s still got braced by Bala-Tik’s head, and all around him is a strange carnage of twisted armor and cauterized limbs. To Armitage’s left, something cybernetic gives a last, sad, whirring croon. 

Ren straightens. Turns and looks at him. The lightsaber powers off with a suck of ozone.

“You’re bleeding,” says Ren.

“I’m fine,” says Armitage. His ears are still ringing. 

Underneath him, Bala-Tik groans and bucks weakly, unsteadily trying to unseat the weight on his back. Armitage reaches down, retrieves his stolen blaster from the holster strap at Bala-Tik’s waist, primes it, and shoots him in the back of the head. 

After the sick, heavy sound of it settles, the bay is eerily silent. 

“Fuck,” he spits, finally. “ _Fuck_.”

Ren steps forward. “Where are you hu—”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Armitage snaps. He clambers to his feet, wiping the blood off his hand onto the front of his trousers. His body feels raw, and light, a little weightless—he can’t tell whether it’s parasympathetic, or just the head wound.

“Let me—” Ren reaches forward with one hand, as if to steady something.

Armitage flinches angrily, and Ren stops, mid-gesture. 

_I want to see you try not to fail at this too_. 

“I’ve said it’s _fine_.” When Armitage touches the back of his own head gingerly, his fingers come away wet and red, but something about the pain seems refreshingly manageable. “Superficial.”

Ren drops his hand, but his fingers clench reflexively at his side. He’s still gripping the lightsaber hilt in his other fist. 

“I didn’t know you still had that,” says Armitage. 

Ren glances down. “I do.”

“They destroyed your shuttle,” says Armitage.

“I know,” says Ren. He’s frowning, tightly.

“They were looking for you,” says Armitage. “Why were they looking for _you_.”

Ren’s brow is pinched when he starts to open his mouth, but he doesn’t get a chance to speak before there is a sharp clatter from the direction of the Zhoraline shuttle. They both start: Armitage primes his blaster again on reflex, Ren whips around with both hands on the hilt of his weapon—

“ _Chumma_ ,” Armitage hisses, realizing. He holsters his blaster. “Kriffing—stand down.” 

“What?” Ren’s stance is protective; the big bulk of him spread wide in the space between Armitage and the rest of the world.

“They shot Chumma.” Armitage chances something subtle: presses his weight forward, just hovering behind Ren, lets his arm brush Ren’s back. “The little alien. Hold on.”

Ren shifts enough to let Armitage through, but Armitage can feel him right behind as he quickly skirts the fallen enforcers to the far end of the bay: a hot resonance at his back and the smell of seared blood trailing. 

Chumma has dragged itself halfway into the empty hull of the shuttle. It’s bleeding from a bad wound on its upper arm, big eyes clenched shut and breathing sharp, heaving, unsteady.

“Shit,” Armitage mutters, crouching down. He presses two fingers to the pale, bloodstained wrist. Chumma’s skin is cool, but Armitage can’t remember whether it was supposed to ever be warm. A thready pulse there, though, something fluttering and uneven. “Do you have a medkit?”

“We have to go,” says Ren. “We don’t have time for—”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do right now,” says Armitage, flatly, not looking up at him.

Ren falls silent.

Armitage exhales, through his nose. He tastes blood at the back of his throat. Can still feel the compressive choke of a Guavian’s boot on his ribs. He remembers the suck of clear, cold air into his lungs when he realized that maybe, he wasn’t going to die after all. Watches Chumma’s thin chest heave weakly. 

“Fuck,” he spits, and bends down to scoop the little alien body into his arms.

“What are you doing?” Ren hisses.

“Cantina,” says Armitage. “Come on.”

\--

Armitage takes them in through the back way, weaving through underused and underlit rusting corridors, freezing filthy water and recycled oil leaking from meteor-rock walls, slick under their feet. They go quickly, as silently as possible. Ren’s presence at his back is still charged with the threat of something else lying in wait; Chumma’s weight is insubstantial in Armitage’s arms. It’s still bleeding, sluggishly. 

At one point, hovering at a junction just before the cantina doors for Ren to give a sign that the coast is clear, Armitage is hit with the chilling drop of adrenaline from his system at the same time that he realizes, maybe, that this may be it. Getting out of one scrape with all your skin intact never means that you’re free to resume whatever it was you were blithely doing before everything came crashing down around your ears. 

The cantina is empty, except for a grizzled and exhausted-looking Lyunesi in the corner of the bar, napping with its frail head propped against one arm. The Twi’lek girl is at the bar, absently wiping the dirty surface down with a rag, when they push through the doors.

“Armitage!” Her smooth face breaks into the familiar, kind smile before it falters, breaks, when she sees the bloody bundle in his arms, and Ren behind him.

“Medkit,” Armitage says, sharply. “Where is it?”

“Is that—”

“Stop talking,” he orders. “And get the medkit.”

She startles, frozen, her hands still knotted in the rag. 

“ _Now_.”

“Here, in the back room, yes?” She drops the rag, points to the durasteel door at the back of the arc of the bar.

“I’ve got it,” Ren says, behind him, and pushes past to hold the door open. 

Inside the cramped and dimly-lit room, he drops Chumma’s body to the floor. The Twi’lek girl reaches up onto one of the haphazard shelves, stocked with a mess of bottles and suspiciously leaking packages of nutri-gel, to pull the medkit down. She hands it to Ren, who is pulling the door mostly shut behind him.

“Move,” Ren says, medkit in hand.

Armitage stands, going to keep watch by the cracked-open door, while the Twi’lek makes a long, low sound of distress when Ren peels back the remnants of Chumma’s jumpsuit to find the wound. 

“What has happened?” She’s still hovering by where Ren is crouched and unpeeling an ancient-looking bacta patch with his fingers and teeth, but Armitage knows she’s asking him.

“Chumma got in the way,” he says.

“What does that mean?” She’s frowning, tightly. “Did you—”

“It’s none of your business,” he says, sharp. Behind her, Ren glances up at him with an unreadable expression.

“What have you done?” She’s looking at him now: her face an unfamiliar pinch of anger.

“Nothing,” he says. He’s still looking at Ren, who has turned back to Chumma’s body, and is wrapping the bacta patch closed with a spool of bandage. “I haven’t done anything.” 

“This—” The girl waves one hand, fretful, in the air. “This does not happen here. Who did this?”

“Guavians,” says Armitage.

“Death Gang?” She makes another low sound in her throat, and goes to her knees on the other side of Chumma’s body, patting its little head with her hand. “Oh no, oh no— _Chumma_.”

“Stop whining,” he says, feeling severe. He’s exhausted. He wants a drink. Wants to know what’s going to happen, now that everything has changed, so he can have a leg up on the world, for once. 

The Twi’lek turns a hurt, angry expression on him. “I am not _whining_ , I am worried for Chumma! He is—good, and he has given you much help, and you are not being—”

“I didn’t _ask_ for this,” he snaps. She flinches. It sends a delicious snap of heat into his chest. “This isn’t my _fault_.”

Chumma is still breathing shallowly, its little chest rising and falling in staccato. The Twi’lek turns her head back to the body again; Armitage can see in her profile the frown pinching her brow.

“You are a bad man,” she says, finally.

“That depends on the metric,” says Armitage. He’s so _tired_. The words taste stale in his mouth.

She shakes her head, lekku swinging against her back. “I thought maybe you were not. Maybe that you were just. Alone. Sad.”

Armitage levels a flat look in her direction. “Humans are complex creatures. Don’t be stupid.”

“Of course, yes. You are not a Hutt,” she says. Her eyes are narrowed. “But you are not a good man, Armitage.”

“No,” he says. He wonders if she might have known, all along. “I’m not.”

“That’s enough,” says Ren, standing. “We’re going.”

“Is Chumma—” the Twi’lek presses her smooth palm to Chumma’s small chest.

“Change the bandage,” says Ren. “When it needs changing.”

On the way out, Armitage considers grabbing a bottle from the bar. But there is still blood matted in his hair, and smeared on his trousers, and he can feel where one of Ren’s big hands is hovering, behind him, just over the small of his back. 

\--

In the lifepod, he’s pacing. The length of it is too short, the space of it too meagre to be satisfying, but he’s got his hands balled at his sides, nails digging into his palms, and he’s striding the distance of it anyway, in short and anxious steps. Ren is watching him, silently, from the center of the room, his weapon strapped back onto his belt and hidden behind a neat fold of his tunic. 

_Cornered_ , Armitage thinks. Incomplete ideas, stuttered options: nothing seems to be able to coalesce to logic inside his own head. The thin veil of anonymity and disinterest has been lifted now, he’ll have to leave—have to outrun whatever line of sight has him locked in, outmaneuver an enemy he can’t see, doesn’t understand. _Cornered again,_ he thinks, _and this time at no kriffing fault of my own_. 

He kicks a crumpled synthe-meal wrapper out of the way with the toe of his boot and draws himself up. Squares his shoulders, hands on his hips. Exhales, stares at Ren across the mere feet between them. 

“Why were they looking for you?” 

Ren’s mouth purses. He’s looking somewhere just to the left of Armitage’s shoulder. “Snoke sent them,” he says, finally.

“Snoke sent the Guavians,” he says, slowly. “After _you_?”

“It's a warning,” says Ren. 

“Of _what_ ,” Armitage snarls. 

Ren is silent; he keeps working his jaw as if there is something unpleasant twisting on his tongue.

“Why in the seven hells would Snoke order you to drag me back through the ashes of my ruined laurels, just to try and see _you_ assassinated by our least capable mercenaries?”

“He didn’t,” says Ren. 

“What?”

The world stops short. He can’t have heard right. _He didn’t_ , Armitage thinks. _He didn’t—_

“Snoke didn’t order me to find you,” says Ren. 

“What the _fu_ —”

“There’s been a schism,” says Ren. His fists keep clenching, unclenching, clenching, unclenching, where they dangle at his sides; the leather is creaking.

“A what,” he says.

“A _schism_ ,” repeats Ren. “They’ve split. From Snoke.”

“ _What_ —”

“I’m going to them,” Ren interrupts him. “To join them.”

“Join _who_ —” 

“You need to come. I said I would bring you.”

“Why would I come with you on this _suici_ —”

“Because they all believe you’re alive!” Ren snaps, fists tight now. “And even the ones that _don’t_ are still loyal to you.”

He freezes. 

“What?”

“They’re loyal,” Ren repeats. “To you. They want you to—”

“This is insane,” Armitage gasps. Something like laughter threatens to burst up outward of his throat. “This is some kind of perverse madness you’ve festered to truth in your own sick brain—” 

“ _Listen_ to me—”

“Even if it were _true_ , what did you think, that I would _thank you_ for this?”He spitting, now, he knows. He doesn’t care. _“_ That I would get on my knees, kiss your boots?”

Ren’s eyes flash. “Hux, you need to _listen_ —”

“You haven't changed at all—haven't learned a bloody thing!” His cheeks are flaming. “All this astral magic nonsense and you're still just a reckless, stupid _child_ who thinks the universe should simply _get out of the way_.”

“I’m here for _you_!” Ren shouts. “Not for me!”

He almost chokes on his own spit, whatever remaining rage that was boiling inside him suddenly pulled up short. 

_For you_ —

A curl of heat settles in his chest, his stomach plummets: and yet so _different_ from every other time in the last two years that he’s found himself face-to-face with the insurmountable wall of his own discomfort. 

“I’ve been a tool for other people’s means for too long,” Ren says. He’s speaking in the cadence that always seemed so darkly threatening behind the mask, in its tightly spooled unpredictability, but without the modulator it comes across as clenched, uneven, fitful. “I thought Snoke was different. He wasn’t.”

The pleading, heavy look in Ren’s eyes makes something constrict even further inside Armitage’s ribs. It’s _too much_ , it’s suffocating. He can’t put the pieces together—how it could be possible, that anyone would turn against the Order, that anyone would ever come after him, that Ren would. That _Ren_ would. 

“ _Fuck_!”

He grabs the nearest thing he can find—a box of dead laz-bolts at the edge of console—and hurls it, as hard as he can, against the far wall. The bolts scatter, plinking softly off the thin durasteel. A bit of rusted paint is dislodged from the ceiling at the impact. In the silence, it wafts sadly downward in the space between them.

Ren doesn’t even flinch; just watches Armitage’s face. 

“Fuck,” he says, again. It comes out weak—a whisper.

“This is what you wanted,” says Ren.

“You don't know what I want,” Armitage spits, tiredly.

“Yes I do,” says Ren. “You're glad I'm here.”

“ _Glad_.” He says it with all the bile he can muster, but it still sounds thready, hoarse. “Oh, yes. I’m _deliriously_ happy. This is everything I’ve ever dreamed.”

“I can tell you what happened,” says Ren. “But you need to—”

“Shut up,” Armitage whispers. “I need—I need to think.”

Ren goes quiet, again.

Armitage sits on the edge of his cot. Presses his elbows atop his thighs and sets his chin on his fists, glares at the bit of rusted paint curled on the lifepod floor. Somewhere far away down the corridor there is the sound of a door clanging open, the shuffle of feet. A reedy, yelping laugh. It won’t be long, he realizes, until someone discovers the pile of dead Guavian mercenaries in the shipbay. 

“I didn’t mean it,” says Ren, finally, into the silence. “That you should—” 

He makes a gesture with his index finger and thumb extended in an ‘L,’ in the vague direction of his own temple.

“Yes, you did,” says Armitage.

Ren looks away, nudges a discarded pack of off-brand Hosnian Royals with the toe of his boot. He shrugs.

Armitage rubs his hands on his thighs, makes two fists when they come away with the brown-dark stains of old blood. He stands, exhaling, takes three steps to the end of the pod, turns, walks back halfway. 

“You lied to me,” he says, finally.

“I didn’t lie,” says Ren.

“By _omission_ ,” Armitage growls.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Ren admits, after a moment. “You did—well. Hiding yourself like this. Not a lot of information to go on. I didn’t know where your loyalties were.”

“My _loyalties_ —” 

“You always believed in him.” Ren cuts him off, but his voice is low. “I felt it. Your—passion. For his approval.”

The _thing_ —that hot, full feeling—it clenches in his chest again.

“You know the truth now,” Ren continues. “I can see that you do. You’ve known it since the first day you found yourself here on this rock. He always thought of you as expendable.”

It feels like a solid punch to the sternum; like someone has the entire organ of his weak and struggling heart clenched in their fist. 

“I never did,” says Ren.

He can’t _breathe_. He wants Ren to stop _talking_. He wants Ren to never stop talking.

“To me,” says Ren. “You are—important.”

And then Ren steps forward, and Armitage has his hands in front of himself, defensive, before he can think. Ren reaches out, into the space between them, and when his gloved fingers curl around Armitage’s bare wrist, Armitage can feel all the way through his own body how quickly betraying the thudding pace of his pulse must be.

"I found you amusing, at times,” Ren says, softly. “Frustrating. Attractive. Distracting. I wanted to strap you to a chair in one of the interrogation rooms and test your intentions. Find out what made you tick. I wanted to slip inside your mind until you were shaking, slick with sweat, red-faced, _begging_ me to stop. I wanted to _take_ something from you. Only I didn’t know what to call it." Heat flushes his cheeks. His pulse leaps again in his veins, something hitches in his throat, and Kylo Ren has his wrist encircled with the tight lock of his large fingers, looking at him with a flicker of something dark and predatory.

"And then. You came for me. When you could have left me to die," Ren says, his voice still pitched low. He lifts Armitage’s hand and presses it to the side of his own face: his skin is warm, and dry, and soft. A fuzzy time-compressed echo of the last time he had his palm on Kylo Ren’s bare skin. Armitage's thumb rests in the sweet little divot of the corner of his mouth. "When you struck me, in the snow, it made sense. I wanted you to _touch_ me."

Armitage—skin-starved, threatened, _exhausted_ —surges forward and kisses him, before he’s even realized that he’s done it. Immediately, the back of his skull clangs nastily against the metal wall of the pod when Ren pushes back, roughly, _vicious_ , with his mouth and his hips and his chest and the whole, large hulk of his body and the sudden, desperate grip of his hands on Armitage’s ribs. He tastes like blood, like a split in Armitage’s own hot and fragile and shaking skin, through which the whole chaotic, trembling universe comes pouring through.

\--

In the admittedly brief and furtive moments in which he had ever entertained the option—once in the sonic, after a particularly fraught encounter, early on; once half-asleep and half-drugged on somnitabs at Mitaka’s insistence that he rest longer than three hours; once simply because he felt angry, and lonely, and had seen his face for the first time—he never imagined that sex with Kylo Ren would be like this.

It wasn’t that he didn’t expect that Ren would be _good_. It’s just that he never imagined that he would be stripped from the waist down, red and gasping face shoved in the thin mattress of his cot with his hips in the air, with big hands holding him open, with Kylo Ren licking wetly into him with his _tongue_.

He can’t stop cursing, hoarsely, into the damp fabric under his face. He can't stop shaking, can't stop from pushing back into the teasing, loosening laving, the way that Ren has him pinned and spread so wide. It’s _maddening_ , the way it’s made him come apart so easily: his own prick a hot shadow against the curve of his stomach, the pulse of it leaking when Ren’s tongue flutters _just_ inside him. He can feel the hard grip of each of Ren’s fingers on his arse as if the bruises were already there, can feel the place where the spur of one ankle is pressed against the outside of Ren’s knee, can feel the increasing sloppy slickness of Ren’s saliva, the way it’s started to _drip_ down the inside of his thighs. When Ren pulls back, mouth pressed softly, flat, against the rim of his hole, and makes a low, rumbling noise of pleasure, Armitage’s whole body spasms, fingers jerking where they’re knotted in the sheets by his head. 

He curses, again, and Ren turns his head and nips at the spot where the skin is pulled taut between his thumb and forefinger. 

“You’ve got a filthy mouth, General,” murmurs Ren, and bites him again, at the same time that Armitage can feel him rub two fingers over his hole, spreading the wetness there.

Out of bleary spite, Armitage buries his next round of gasping— _fuck, fuck, oh fuck_ —into the pillow.

“I didn’t say I minded.”

Ren presses his mouth to the divot of Armitage’s tailbone, and slides one finger in. The way Ren’s body pulls back, the loss of his heat against Armitage’s thighs, the low noise he makes in his throat—it makes Armitage realize that Ren is _watching_. Watching the slow, filthy circling of the pad of his finger around the rim, the dip inside, all the way to the knuckle.

One arm gives out, shaking. He collapses onto his shoulders, and Ren is surging upward to coax him roughly onto his side, leaning over his ribs to tilt his head back by his hair, to kiss Armitage hard on the mouth. His teeth catch on Armitage’s lower lip; he swallows the helpless noise Armitage makes, greedy and suffocating.

“That's—” Armitage hisses when he feels Ren slide another finger inside along the first, the flat of his thumb pressed _hard_ up against the sensitive skin behind his balls. “That's disgusting.” 

He's starting to slur, he knows. Ren’s mouth is hot, bitter; his teeth still catching on Armitage’s lips like bright little sparks in the dark, like he might not know how to do anything without an edge of half-violent consumption.

Ren twists his fingers deeper in response, sliding his tongue along Armitage’s jaw instead. Despite himself, despite _disgusting_ , Armitage tips his chin, trying to chase his mouth; Ren catches his chin with his free hand and tilts his face away roughly, exposing the line of his throat.

“Disgusting?” Ren murmurs, teeth scraping the shell of Armitage’s ear. His two fingers inside Armitage give a sharp little jab, upwards and curving. “What if I did it again, after? Licked my own come from this tight little ass and fed it back to you with my tongue.”

“ _F-fuck—_ ”

“Don't pretend. I know what you want,” says Ren, mouth wet against the side of Armitage’s throat, on the roughness of his unshaven skin. “I can see it. You want— _debasement.”_

Armitage tries to deflect the hot, reeling spike of arousal that courses straight from his toes to the center of his gut. He squirms, reaches up behind himself and gets a hand tangled in the thick spill of Ren’s hair.

“And what do you want?” His own voice is unsteady. He swallows, trying to right himself, but he can feel the thick weight of Ren’s large, erect prick pressed up against the damp skin of his own inner thigh. It makes him _hoarse_ , his mouth water, the idea of it.

Ren makes a thick, frustrated grunt in the back of his throat. “I want to _fuck—you,_ ” he growls, punctuating it with two sharp upward twists of his fingers inside Armitage’s body.

“Medkit,” he gasps, gesturing blindly at the floor near the foot of the cot.

Ren makes a rough noise, and releases Armitage long enough to twist his body over the side of the cot (Armitage hisses, into his pillow, as Ren’s fingers slip out), one large, warm, damp hand still spread possessively on Armitage’s inner thigh.

This is _insane_ , thinks Armitage, rolling onto his back and pushing himself up to his elbows, admiring through half-lidded eyes the curve of Ren's naked thighs, the broad width of his ribs. _This is completely mad_ , he thinks. He's so aroused he can hardly _breathe_ , and Kylo Ren is looking at him, at his withered, spacesick, exiled, filthy body, like it is something he wants to devour.

Ren tears open the lubrication packet with his teeth; Armitage takes the opportunity to—observe, a little more closely. Ren’s body is a knot of scar tissue, from the valley of his hips to his broad shoulders. The healed wound on his side is hyper-pale and sinuous, the slash on his shoulder saturated pink and still somehow raw-looking. A litany of other unknown injuries: traces of knife-points, burns, blaster strikes. Yet under it all, Ren is _powerful_ , clean. And between his folded thighs, blood-dark, and straining, and frankly _massive_ —

“What?”

“I’m—” he wets his lips, without thinking. “Impressed.”

Ren’s mouth twitches. Even in the dim light, Armitage can see what looks like betrayal of a flush on Ren’s face.

“Good,” says Ren. He tosses the packet somewhere over the edge of the cot, two of the fingers of his right hand now glistening obscenely. “Spread your legs.”

He scoots his arse down the small cot as much as he’s able without dislodging Ren, parting his knees. His face is on _fire_ , and Ren is leaning over him with one hand braced on the cot and the other sliding between Armitage’s legs, wet knuckles grazing along the sensitive skin behind his balls.

“Wider.” Ren’s thumb, slick and warm, rubs firmly against Armitage’s rim; he slides a thick finger inside again when Armitage lets one of his legs fall open to the cot.

It’s easier now, with the lubricant: the drag of it still filthy and tight, but the easing of the pressure and the way Ren groans softly—Armitage tips his head back, exhales loudly through his nose. He lets one of his hands drift over the hot skin of his own stomach, grips loosely at the head of his prick with a dry palm. 

“Another?” It’s a formality, the question: Ren is already working a second finger inside of him—soft little corkscrew motions and slick, sticky noises.

“You’d better,” Armitage says, swallowing down a gasp. “With a cock like that.”

“Been a while?” Ren mumbles, pushing Armitage’s shirt up with the flat of his palm and licking experimentally at Armitage’s chest, teeth grazing the peak of a nipple. 

Armitage pinches his bicep, hisses. “I can still kick you out.”

“You won’t,” says Ren, and curls his fingers, pressing his thumb up against the puffy, sensitive skin of Armitage’s rim.

He can’t think of an insult, after that. His eyes have rolled back in his head and he’s made an embarrassing sort of whine in his throat, and his back has arched taut, and Ren is sucking a bruise into the vulnerable skin of his throat, a suffocating, consuming weight against him, over him, and there is a moment where, for the first time in years, he has absolutely no control over his body, his feeling, his nerves or his heart or his brain or his voice, and it feels— _wonderful_.

“You're so—” Ren bites off a curse, one hand fisting in the length of Armitage’s long and unkempt hair, tugging his head back to expose his throat further, the other hand thrusting in earnest now, wrist pumping.

“ _Ah_ , fuck—”

“I want––I can't _choose_ ,” he hisses, against Armitage’s mouth, and Armitage’s mind is suddenly, blindingly flooded with an image of his own body from above, his thighs jackknifed over his chest, his stomach flushed, two large hands— _Ren’s, his own?_ —gripping the span of his inner thighs, pressing them down and open so he can see the desperate, plunging thrusts of his— _Ren’s?—_ cock, pistoning in and out of his body, his own prick an angry red, leaking on his belly, his chest, leaving wet little smears with every bounce of—

Ren groans in his ear, his fingers twist and _hook_ inside Armitage’s body, and the images are gone, the sensations snatched away from him, leaving him gasping and disoriented, dizzying sparks in his vision. He reaches out with an arm, half-frantic, as if to steady himself, and he feels Ren grab it with his hand and pin it above his head by his wrist, and suddenly his mind is flooded again.

This time his own body from behind, his spine bowed, arse in the air like a _whore,_ this time the hands spreading his body even more obscenely, a palm on each cheek, thumbs framing him, catching at the rim of his hole, this time watching as Ren— _as him_ —rubs the head of his thick cock up and down the crease of his arse, this time watching as Ren— _as him—_ slides one hand to grip the base of it, pushes it in, a treacle-slow tease, just a blunt little dip, slides it out again to _slap_ the head of it against Armitage’s red, wet hole.

“ _That one_ —” he gasps, before he can think. In his head, he had even felt the _sound_ of it. His cock twitches, jumps, against his stomach. “Ah, fuck. _That one_.”

“Mm.” Ren’s voice is a low rumble against his ear. The vividness of the images pulls back, fading slightly, leaving a glittering echo of doubled sensation hovering at the edges of Armitage’s nerves. “I like that one. Sometimes you let me flip you over, come on you. On your stomach. Or I hold your mouth open and I come on your tongue, all over your face.”

“What—” He's gasping. Ren has released his wrist and has two fingers pressed against his lower lip. Armitage licks at them mindlessly, feels them press hard against the ridge of his teeth, hook at the corner of his mouth. “What are you—”

“I've thought about it,” says Ren. “What it would be like to fuck you. All the things I could do to you.”

Armitage swallows hard, when Ren traces a wet line down his jaw. Inside him, Ren’s finger’s twist once more and then pull out, thumb still pressed against the rim of Armitage’s hole. He can feel the anxious tightness of what’s underneath Ren’s words knot with the heated coil of arousal, just below his ribs. 

_I’ve thought about_ , he thinks, and tries not to be obvious about the fact that it makes his face flushed and his skin prickle. _It means he thought about you_. _He thought about_ you _._

“Get up,” Ren says, and smacks the outside of Armitage’s naked thigh. “Shirt off.”

Armitage’s barely sat up and got his shirt over his head before Ren is shoving another lubrication packet into his hands and leaning back into the sheets, maneuvering Armitage with big palms and muscular thighs, having him straddle his wide lap with knees pressed into the mattress on either side of Ren’s hips and Ren’s enormous prick just below him, straining against that scarred, pale stomach.

“What, like this?” Armitage tears open the packet, warms the slick in his palms; he wraps his fingers around Ren’s reddened cock quickly, to hide the fact that they might be trembling. 

Ren’s mouth twitches again. It looks more like a smirk this time. 

"This first," he says, staying Armitage’s wrist with huge sticky fingers around the bony jut of it, guiding Armitage's hand behind his own thigh and nudging his fingers against the already sloppy, hot gape of his body. 

Armitage feels his mouth fall open into a shamefully aroused, horrified grimace, as Ren slides his fore and middle fingers into himself, tugging his wrist back and forth. 

"Enough," Armitage gasps; hits him on his huge, bare shoulder.

“Shh,” says Ren, still smirking. “I’ll help you.”

Three fingers, then. Two of his own and one of Ren’s, alongside. It’s quickly overwhelming, the feeling of Ren’s palm over the back of his hand, the combined stretch of their fingers, together, pressing him open. 

“Do you like the way you feel,” murmurs Ren. “How wet you are?”

“I’d like it, if you stopped this, and _fucked_ me,” Armitage manages, despite the shivers running up his spine, despite the gasping.

“Keep your hand there,” Ren says. “Hold yourself open for me.”

His finger slips free, hand moving to Armitage’s hip to lift him up, the other circling the base of his cock as he shifts, until the shaft is sliding along Armitage's crease, the head of it bumping against his knuckles. 

“Mm,” Ren rumbles, and Armitage hisses when he feels the beginning of the blunt, hot breach. “C’mon.”

Armitage leans in, bracing himself against Ren’s chest with one hand, tilting his hips as his other hand slips away from the pressure of Ren’s cock, but he keeps his fingers gripped where he can, keeping himself still and spread.

He can’t remember the last time he felt this— _visible_. His whole life clawing his way to something worth being looked at, jealous of, admired and mostly feared, and then eighteen months of bleary dimness and diminishment: mocking disbelief from completely useless strangers, xenoforms only ever squeezed from their putrid eggs in order to drink and breed and die _laughing_ at the possibility of his existence from across dirty rooms, loosing a sense of recognition of his own face in the mirror.

He _wants_ this. A thick cock up his arse, and _Kylo Ren_ inside his head, looking all the way through him.

Ren makes a low noise in the back of his throat. “I like you like this,” he says, running both palms up Armitage’s thighs, over his hips and holding him there, perched and shaking.

“Like—” his words catch, when he tries to swallow. He’s still reeling. “Like what.”

“Dirty,” Ren whispers, and cants his hips. Armitage _whines_ , before he can help himself. “Ashamed. Someone else’s blood on you. It makes me feel like I can fuck you.”

A jolt of arousal makes Armitage dig his fingers in where they are braced against Ren’s chest. “You _are_ fucking me, you horrible—”

Ren grips his hips, hard, and thrusts upward: whatever words left in Armitage’s throat are driven out of him in a startled, open-mouthed gasp.

“You were so clean,” Ren grunts. His palms are hot, where they’re holding Armitage in place. Armitage tries to squirm against the discomfort: the delicious still-painful stretch of Ren’s cock, almost all the way inside him. “Before. Back on the _Finalizer_. Pristine—in control.”

“Shit, shit—” he’s gasping. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. They grip harder at Ren’s ribs, dragging against the knotted tissue of the scar at his side. “Ren, I—”

“Does it hurt?” Ren’s mouth is open, panting. It’s not said with any concern, it sounds _filthy_ , dripping. 

Armitage tries to rock his hips again, either to pull off or to let Ren bottom out. He jerks his chin. His eyes are starting to water.

“You can take it,” Ren murmurs, releases his grip enough to rub his thumbs against the jut of Armitage’s hipbones. One hand slides lower, pressing against Armitage’s inner thigh, forcing him wider with a kind of heady reverence. He ducks his head and his eyes flash. “Look at you—you _are_ taking it.” 

It has the edge of a challenge. And something just enough like praise to make Armitage’s own prick twitch, precome leaking from the head with a weak spurt, drooling from the tip and onto Ren’s stomach. Ren catches his lower lip between his teeth and slides his hand from Armitage’s inner thigh, smears his fingers through the mess on his stomach and slicks Armitage’s cock with it and— _oh_. 

He’s panting now, open-mouthed, watching Ren’s large hand work on his cock, feeling the burning stretch inside him pulse, and pulse, and then start to settle. Ren presses his hips up, again, still holding Armitage in place with the other hand on his hip, and Armitage’s lashes flutter, his eyes roll back into his head, a little, when he feels Ren bottom out inside him. 

“Sh—” he swallows, tripping on his words. His tongue feels thick; loose. “Show me again.”

“I can’t,” Ren says, hoarse. His eyes are lidded, his mouth hanging open. “I’m— _ah_. I’m distracted.”

Armitage clenches around him, tentatively. Ren hisses, but it gets his attention. Blown-black eyes and the wet dark space of his mouth, the white flash of his teeth, the bitten rawpink of his mouth, blood flushing the scar like it’s been cut new. His fingers loosen on Armitage’s cock; he’s using both his hands on Armitage’s hips again.

“Tell me, then.”

Ren makes a thick, stuttering noise in his throat when he starts to rock Armitage’s hips with his gripping palms, in a maddeningly slow rhythm. “After you left, I thought about letting you control me. About letting you press me to the floor with your boots, _ordering_ me to—”

“Oh _fuck_.”

“I would have let you do it,” says Ren, voice cracking on the edges. “I would have let you whip me until I bled, would have let you— _ah_ —let you fuck my throat, let you tie me down and leave me there, let you mock me, let you tell me what a monster I was, what a disgusting _mess_ I’d made of everything—”

“Yes,” Armitage gasps. Ren’s hands are like a vice on his hips, _fucking_ him onto his cock. “Yes, oh—”

“I would have _crawled_ to you,” Ren hisses, and grabs one of Armitage’s hands from his chest, dragging it roughly upward and pressing it to the wide, soft span of his own throat. 

Armitage closes his fingers around Ren’s neck, and the groan he makes—low, stuttering, thick—Armitage can feel it through his palm. He lets his hand slip upward, cupping and then pressing just below Ren’s jutting adam’s apple, stifling the frantic bob and jerk of it when Ren tries to swallow.

“Harder—” Ren chokes, and then his hands are back on Armitage’s hips, grabbing around to the meat of his arse and shoving up into him again.

He closes his eyes. In the warm and stifling dark of it, it’s all sensation, like two pulse points on either side of a curved horizon line: the hot, rough drag of Ren’s cock inside him and the shuddering leap of Ren’s gasping breath under his fingers. He _squeezes_ , and Ren bucks under him, and his throat flutters when he tries to shout. There is no sound but Armitage can feel it, all of it—the pulse of Ren’s cock inside him when he comes, and the shape of his name in Ren’s voiceless gasp, under his palm. 

\--

He supposes he must have dozed off, at least for a little while, because the last thing he remembers is Ren’s large hand cradling the back of his skull, and the next thing he knows he is waking, blearily, his own cock stirring against his thigh as Ren mouths wetly at the ridge of his hip, spread hands holding his sleep-pliant thighs open.

“What—” he manages, muzzily, pushing himself up onto his elbows. He feels flushed already where his skin had just been cool from sleep. Ren hums at his hip and the sound, the vibration, is like an immediate little dart of warmth—sweet and hot and coiling—right into the pit of his lower belly.

“I got you hard again,” mumbles Ren, against his thigh. His eyes flicker up to meet Armitage's, the slight tilt of his mouth looks _proud_. One of his hands slides up to encircle the base of Armitage’s thickening cock. “Can I suck you off?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” says Armitage, eloquently, the strength going out of his limbs immediately. 

Ren takes this as a ‘yes.’

At some point, Armitage turns his head and stuffs his own fist into his mouth, biting at his own knuckles to keep from embarrassing himself with the desperate, hitching noises he feels catching in his throat. 

Ren—cruel, perverse, _terrible_ —reaches up and tugs Armitage’s hand from his mouth and pins it at his side, leaving Armitage to suffer, open-mouthed, gasping into the pile of sheets rucked up by his head. 

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, where his thoughts are still vaguely coherent and still mostly cynical, there is a dark, spiraling eddy of misery that keeps telling him how fucking _pitiful_ it is that it's been this long since he felt anything half as good as Kylo Ren’s mouth on his prick: sloppy, wet, inexpert, _incredible_.

Maybe it’s because of the lingering spite, behind this, that he doesn’t warn Ren before he comes. Maybe, though, it’s because the orgasm catches him by surprise—Ren drags the flat of tongue up the vein on the underside of Armitage’s cock and sucks his cheeks in and suddenly Armitage is seeing grey-white ash behind his eyelids and he’s got a handful of Ren’s hair clenched in his fist as he holds him _down_ , while his body shakes.

He doesn’t even protest, this time, when Ren crawls over him and fits their mouths together: sharing the taste again. Ren kisses like Armitage isn’t still reeling, isn’t really able to match the ferocity of the swipes of his tongue, the scrape of his teeth.

Armitage hums into his mouth, and Ren ruts up against his hip: juvenile, a little roughly. 

“Would you like—” he reaches down between their bodies, his fingers grazing the thick, warm bulb of the head of Ren’s prick tucked up against his lower belly.

“No,” Ren hisses, jerks back. Armitage is hit with a sudden sharp reel of images, like a seizure, a lightning storm: Armitage on his knees with his lips sliding over the head of Ren's cock, the sensation of choking, the image of his own body with his arms tied behind the small of his back, the backs of his thighs raked with the pink striping of lashes, himself, clothed, standing over Ren’s kneeling, naked body, a boot heel pressed into Ren’s swollen, reddened crotch, Ren's face streaked with wetness—and then, sharply, Ren seems to recover. He lifts his body, planting his hands on either side of Armitage’s head, leaning in to mouth at his neck while Armitage’s mind _reels._

_“You—_ ” Armitage gasps. “You can't keep doing that, I'm going to _murder_ —”

“Shut up,” Ren says, hoarsely, and shoves three fingers into Armitage’s open mouth. “I was—close.”

Armitage tries to glare, but Ren sits back on his heels slightly, straddling Armitage’s hips: his skin warm and pale, and his erection bobbing high against his stomach, and his large, thick fingers pressing down against Armitage’s tongue, and suddenly everything is difficult.

Ren regards him, for a moment—eyes heavy lidded, color flushing high on his cheeks—before he draws his fingers out of Armitage’s mouth slowly, and slaps Armitage’s hip with the flat of his palm. “Turn over.”

Sluggish, still warmed from the inside-out, he goes onto his stomach, but Ren catches him halfway and corrects him, shoving him onto his side and curling up behind him. Armitage feels the thick, dry heat of Ren’s cock nestling into the curve of his arse, sighs despite himself when Ren rocks his hips. There’s that suddenly now-familiar grip of one of Ren’s hands on his hips. The other arm curls under Armitage’s ribs to settle gently on Armitage’s throat, and then upwards: Ren’s palm presses against his jaw, his chin, his mouth.

“Here,” Ren says, against his ear. “Spit.”

“You’re a beast,” says Armitage, but there’s no heat behind it. When he spits into Ren’s palm, Ren nips the skin just below his ear, as if in thanks. 

There’s some shuffling, behind him, as he can feel Ren shift backward enough to get his spit-slickened palm around his own prick again. He closes his eyes, bites his lower lip, and pretends for a moment that maybe he is somewhere else: not here, in a filthy, repurposed , rust-bitten cocoon. Not here, on a sick and dying edge of the galaxy with shame roiling like bile in his gut. Maybe he is back on the _Finalizer_. Maybe he is back on _Starkiller_ , in his quarters, and Ren has just begged for his forgiveness and he, Armitage has just administered his acceptance with the leather end of a belt, or maybe he has had Ren on his knees until tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, or maybe he has just successfully fired the weapon into the sky, again, for a second time, and soon the universe will come to him, bent to their elbows, in desperation and fear and love.

“Now you’re getting it,” murmurs Ren. 

“Stop that,” he mutters, slapping Ren’s hand away when it slides from his hip up his ribs, to pinch at a nipple.

“No,” breathes Ren, against his neck. “Close your thighs for me.”

He huffs, confused, but Ren just does it for him, pressing one big hand down on Armitage’s flank and using the other to guide the head of his half-slick cock into the tight space between Armitage’s legs, just below his balls.

“Tighter,” Ren hisses, into his ear, and Armitage clenches his thighs as Ren thrusts again, and again, and again, and groans.

“You can fuck me,” Armitage slurs. “If you want, you can—I'm still.”

_Ready_ , he means to say. His body feels strangely expansive, wide, open, warm. Something is sparking hotly under his skin, inside his brain. Ren’s hands on him feel _amazing_.

“You're still wet,” Ren growls, in his ear. There is the pressure of Ren’s wrist tucking in between their bodies, the flat push of a thumb against his entrance, the scraping catch against the rim, an experimental nudge inside. Ren’s shaky exhale against the back of his neck. “Fuck—you're still.”

Ren doesn’t wait, doesn’t verbalize that maybe he’d been _concerned_ , somehow, for Armitage’s well-being, a thought that makes something tight and unusual constrict around Armitage’s ribs. It makes the gasp forced out of him with the breach of Ren’s prick sound _horrible_ —helpless. 

The sound Ren makes in return is hoarse and broken, his fingers back on Armitage’s throat, tightening like five pinpricks of heat. Armitage, in a thick, heavy haze, feels Ren manage three, four deep, stuttering thrusts. He squeezes his thighs together as if Ren’s prick is still pushing between them, turns his chin in Ren’s grip, searching for Ren’s mouth to swallow down the tight, desperate keening he can feel building in his chest.

Ren kisses him; Armitage reaches back with his unpinned arm and knots his fingers into Ren’s hair, tugs hard in a semblance of wordless gratitude. 

“Again,” Ren rasps, harshly, into his mouth. “Fuck— _again._ ”

He pulls again, harder this time; his teeth catch at Ren’s lower lip. 

Something shifts, then. Ren groans, giving another two uneven, shuddering thrusts inside Armitage’s body, and then he is pulling out (the drag of it just too sharp and uncontrolled to be fully pleasurable; Armitage squirms), left hand digging bruises into the shallow curve of Armitage’s hip, right hand closing like a spasm over Armitage’s throat. And when he comes, it is with a wordless, shuddering exhale, on the sleep-warm, freckled, intimate dip of Armitage’s lower back.

\--

Ren is dozing. Armitage has found a single, barely-crushed cigarra, inside a console drawer. He’s had two blistering orgasms in the space of an hour, he’s been told in no uncertain terms several things that he can’t think about too closely without feeling like his throat is closing up, the pleasureable panic of revelation. He stares at the ceiling, resists the urge to close his eyes and drift into unconsciousness, at the risk that he will wake up on the other side and realize that none of it will have ever happened at all. 

He reaches up, toggles off the light by the hanging string, holds the cigarra between his fingers close to his chest, lighter tucked under his thumb.

“Are you asleep?” He asks. In the sudden dark, his own voice sounds very loud and hoarse.

“No,” says Ren, from beside his hip.

“Tell me what happened,” he says, and put the cigarra to his lips, lights it, watching the cherry of it spark and settle.

Ren is quiet, for a moment. When he speaks, he presses the ridges of his knuckles to the soft and damp skin of Armitage’s belly.

“I was alone,” he says. “For a very long time. It was like—an echo chamber. I kept trying to silence the distraction, the pain. The loneliness. I wasn’t successful. I—indulged.”

“Indulged,” Armitage repeats. A haze of smoke floats above their heads.

“Fantasies,” says Ren. “Of you. Of the girl. Fucking both of you. Sometimes—killing both of you. I was confused. Isolated. Snoke was displeased and I was—getting worse. He made a mistake. He thought one of us could keep the balance alone. That _I_ could keep the balance alone.”

_I don’t know what that means_ , thinks Armitage. He lets one hand rest on his stomach, just grazing where Ren’s fingers are. 

“I felt abandoned,” continues Ren. “I didn’t know it at the time, but he was struggling to maintain power. The First Order was coming apart at the seams, without you. That was a misstep.”

“Who did he promote?”

“Kaplan,” says Ren. “I think.”

Armitage snorts.

“I got a message,” says Ren. “One day. Encrypted, vague. From the Captain.”

“Phasma?”

“It was a gamble,” says Ren. “They were planning a mutiny. She didn’t say it, but I’m not stupid.”

“Not all the time,” says Armitage, which earns him a dull pinch of Ren’s fingers at his hip.

“I waited,” says Ren. “Things began to feel—strange. Rips in the sky. Tugging, you know?”

“No,” says Armitage. “I don’t know.”

Ren huffs, a hot pulse of breath against Armitage’s skin. “I left. I think maybe he _let_ me leave.”

“You just left? Like that?”

“Like that,” says Ren. “I’m stronger than him.”

He is. It’s odd, Armitage thinks, that he’d never realized it before. The elegant simplicity of the truth of it—that Ren could have at any point killed every single one of them and taken the universe for himself. He resists the urge to reach down and sweep some of Ren’s dark hair between his fingers.

“What did you do?”

“I located Phasma. The encrypted channel she gave me. She explained what happened. They’d split, but the mutiny was—unsuccessful. A quarter of the fleet, maybe. That’s yours. Loyal to you. Somewhere in the Unknown Regions. But Snoke lives. The First Order’s limping, but intact.”

Armitage exhales, slowly, watching the smoke curl. He thinks he can see, for a brief moment, the flicker of the plan of it, in the haze. The splintering shards, the way they came apart, the way they could be fitted back together again.

“She never believed Snoke executed you, whatever he told Command. So she asked me to find you,” says Ren, finally. “And I did.”

“When did you speak with her?”

“Last week,” says Ren. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“Last _week_?” Armitage gapes. Last week he had been scraping his own jaw up off the floor and getting sick in a dark, dank corridor.

“You were easy to find.” Ren shifts, rolls onto his back. “I’ve known you a long time.”

He is right about this, too. Armitage sucks more smoke into his lungs, watching Ren’s profile in the half-dark. He is, he realizes, one of his longest— _relationships_. Never quite a comrade-in-arms, both of them always too bullish and ambitious to be _friends_. Never truly at odds enough to be enemies. He has watched Ren grow from a sullen youth in a hood to a shadow rumor in the shape of Darth Vader, a piece of the world that the universe saw fit to instill with feeling and power and want and rage and desire and then let him loose upon the galaxy with no concern for how everyone might want to contain him. He thinks, with a cold, sick sort of feeling in his stomach, that he had always assumed that Ren had had free will. And that he had been wrong to think so. 

“Now what?” he asks.

“That’s up to you,” says Ren. “You know everything now.”

_I don’t_ , he thinks. _I don’t know anything._

It is the kind of ignorance born of the unknown, of uncertainty. They feel the same. When plans fall apart, for all one has attempted to anticipation all deviations, when reckless human nature throws a wobbling orbit around a sun, it feels the same as if there has been no studying at all, no planning at all, no schematics, no intelligence, no strategy. 

_It happens to us all at some point_ , _Junior_ , his father had said. It was supposed to be advice. To not lie down after taking a hit on the nose.

_Don’t call me that_ , he had wanted to say. He was a _lieutenant_ , then. He was rising through the ranks. He had just misjudged the extremity of personal affections. The assignment that was supposed to have been his had gone to someone else. Not even nepotism—but _love_.

_You couldn’t have assumed he’d actually be that stupid_. His father had laughed.

_I should have_ , he’d said.

_Ah, well_. His father had lifted one palm to the sky—a strangely careless gesture. _It’ll get him in the end_. _It always does_.

And Armitage had thought: _Was that how it happened to you? Am I the thing in the world that you never saw coming_.

“You keep thinking about him,” says Ren.

“Who?”

“Your father,” says Ren.

He frowns. “I’m not fond of this new habit of yours.”

“What habit.”

“You keep— _taking_ these things,” he taps his own temple. Ash scatters on the sheets. “From me. You didn’t do that, before.”

Ren’s shoulders hunch in something that looks like a shrug. He props his chin on his folded arms. “You’re louder, now.”

“I’m not _loud_ ,” he mutters. 

“Your thoughts are,” says Ren. “They’re—scattered. You’re distracted, by your failure. These things you think I’m taking, they’re just rising to the top. Scum on the surface of a pond.”

He pulls a face. “That doesn’t give you the right to be invasive.”

“It does if it’s relevant,” says Ren.

“How is this relevant?”

“Why do you keep thinking about him?” Ren tilts his head, peering up at Hux from beneath his tangled hair, his thick dark lashes. His eyes are glittering in the dimness.

Armitage feels a knot form in the center of his chest; grits his teeth against it. Draws some smoke. “Well,” he says, finally, exhaling. “Well. He’s dead.”

“So?” says Ren.

“So I’m—” He pauses. “I think about it. Sometimes.”

“What part?”

“The part where he _died_ , Ren,” he snaps. “ _Stars_ , are you playing stupid on purpose?”

“Yes,” says Ren. The corner of his mouth twists in something that looks like a grin.

“Stop it,” he says. 

“No,” says Ren, closing his eyes. “How did he die?”

Armitage squints at the ceiling, watching the weakening bulb swaying gently overhead in the pulse of recycled air. Locates the empty patch where the scrape of loose paint had fallen away. He thinks of shriveled filaments, rusted-out coils, logic boards eaten away at by acid and grime. He thinks about instruments failing.

“Everyone said it was an accident,” he says, finally. “His blaster misfired. He was cleaning it.” 

“Was it?” Ren shifts beside him, propping himself up on his elbows and running a hand through his hair. It spills back over his cheeks; Armitage considers for a moment reaching out and tucking it behind Ren’s ear. His fingers twitch on his belly. He sucks on his cigarra instead.

“Was it what.”

“An accident,” says Ren. 

“No,” says Armitage, exhaling. “No, I don’t think so.”

Ren rolls onto his back. “Runs in the family, then,” he says, to the lifepod ceiling.

Armitage bares his teeth. “Arsehole.”

Ren’s lips twitch. “Mm.”

Armitage frowns down at his naked stomach, at the cradle of his hands resting there, still smeared with grease and rust and old blood, at the place on the first knuckle of his middle finger where there is a now a yellow-pale stain of nicotine. When he brings the cigarra to his lips again, he can feel the slight tremor in his wrist, the sting of air on the places on his body where there is saliva and sweat and semen still cooling. When he exhales, he can feel Ren’s eyes on him.

“What,” he mutters.

“Put that out,” says Ren, rolling over to straddle Armitage’s hips, taking one of Armitage’s wrists in the circle of his thick fingers and pressing it back against the mattress. “I’m going to fuck you again.” 

\--

“You have to come with me now,” says Ren, afterward. 

“That's not how sex works,” says Armitage. 

(Maybe it is. He’s not sure, anymore.)

Ren shifts; the nest of sheets and discarded clothing rustles under his hips, but he's silent.

“You could stay here,” says Armitage, exhaling, feeling loose and unwired and fucked-out and foolish and crazed and almost–– _kind_. “You could just stay here and we could fuck like perverted little cretins inside this horrible tin pod until one of us dies from boredom.”

“You don't want that,” says Ren. The cot creaks, as his body moves to the edge, and then bounces slightly as he stands.

“Where are you going?” Armitage feels prickly, underneath his skin.

“Food,” says Ren, simply. Armitage can see the outline of his broad shoulders in the dimness. “You're too thin.”

\-- 

There is snow falling on his face. It’s very cold. His fingers, when he reaches up to try and brush the snow away, are numb. There is a dark canopy above his face, something like a bower, something like a curved ceiling of rust. When he looks down at his hands, they are sharp like glass and gathering pools of melted cold water in the cupped palms. 

There is a noise, far away. He turns to look; something crashes in the brush, in the forest. Something splits in half and fall away. A glimmer of fire, of red, streaking across the dark, and he reaches out to it to pull it back to where it can be closer to him, but Ren is beside him and gripping at his wrists. 

“Don't look,” says Ren. His hands are on Armitage’s face, turning him away. “It's not important.”

“You're wrong,” says Armitage. “It's all important.”

Ren grips his chin in fingers like a vice and his eyes are black like a deep wide chasm. “Listen to me,” he says.

Again and far away, there is the low rumble of the earth coming apart. Something sparks, at the edge of his vision.

“I can make you _king_ ,” says Ren. His voice is the sharp, metallic rebound of an echo inside Armitage’s skull. 

When Ren shifts, leans over, one large hand against the ground on either side of Armitage’s face, his hair falls in wild knots of silk. There are stars glittering in his hair. When Armitage reaches up to clutch at them, they fall away like scattered, melting ash.

\--

He gasps awake: alone, and _freezing_. It’s cold—colder than even it is normally when the life support network is disrupted by some faulty connection and they are forced to divert heat to oxygen supply until Chumma can crawl into the vents and find the malfunction. He can see his _breath_ , the air feels very, very thin. He’s half-sat up in the cot, Ren is nowhere to be found, and he’s clutching the sheets to his naked chest, still reeling from the sound of Ren’s voice in his dream.

He leans over the cot, cursing under his breath, and finds most of his discarded clothing. Pulls on his underwear, discovers his trousers, now stiff with the stains of blood, underneath his shirt; he grabs his worn greatcoat from where it has ended up shoved into the corner of the cot, shakes it out, wraps it around his shoulders.

“Fuck,” he hisses, breathing into his cupped palms, while he tries to locate his boots, his blaster, tries to keep his heart-rate level and his breathing even. 

It’s when he’s pulling on his boots that he hears it—disorienting, with how familiar it is. A distant shout, from somewhere down the backend corridors, and then the _thumpthumpthumpthumpthump_ of regular, heavy bootfalls. The same he grew up with, the same he heard every minute of every kriffing cycle on the _Finalizer_.

He almost trips, when he stumbles to the door to put his shoulder up against it, fumbling with the prime on his blaster as he presses his ear to the blisteringly cold durasteel, wet with condensation already. 

He hears it again, a little closer. Hears the clanging noise of a fist on metal, another shout he can’t make out. He swallows, hard, and slides one hand from his blaster to the door latch, the forefinger of his other hand ready on the trigger as he eases it open, cranes his head just enough into the crack of light to peer down the corridor.

A row of white helmets. F-11 Ds, unholstered. White armor. At least half of a squad.

He eases the door closed, leans back against it. Closes both hands on the grip of his blaster and takes three long, steadying breaths. Works through the available information.

_Stormtroopers—Snoke. Air inside the Forks already thin and freezing—they’ve interfered with life support. Trying to flush something out. They’re split up. Going from sector to sector—they still haven’t found Ren._

He swallows, exhales; a plume of steam curls into the air. He’s already feeling the effects of it, the trembling in his jaw, the thick unsteadiness of his fingers where they curl around his blaster. He shoves his arms, one by one, into the sleeves of his greatcoat, and attempts to work it through again, this time going forward.

_Can’t be pinned in here—slip out before they get down this end. Find a vantage point to regroup. Fire hatch halfway down leads to ventilation catwalk—could use that to get back to the main corridors._ _Will have to shoot them back to get to hatch—can’t get that far without them noticing. Ambush will buy enough time—just keep shooting. They’ll be in the shipbay, they’ll have secured it—head towards the core._

He goes through it again. His teeth are starting to chatter. He can hear another clang of metal, maybe one door closer.

_One_.

He shifts his grip, secures his finger on the trigger.

_Two_.

Catches the latch with his wrist, pulls it to the ‘open’ position.

_Three_.

He slings open the door, gets both hands back on the blaster, and flings himself out into the corridor.

He gets five steady shots in, as he’s running, before anything happens. Maybe thirty yards away, in front of him, the white knot of ‘Troopers splinters, scatters: one of them goes down with armor sparking by the ribs. There’s a shout, and then the firing starts: and Armitage is ducking, still shooting, while blaster sparks explode around him. 

The ‘Troopers push back in their startle, their training forcing them to a corner position where they can find cover, and Armitage takes advantage in the half-second lull to cease firing and kick at the latch-valve to the fire hatch: three feet wide and square where it’s bolted into the durasteel sidewall of the corridor. 

It comes away with a metallic clatter, skittering down the corridor floor at the same time that something sharp and searing-white-painful happens to his left shoulder. 

“Wait—” he hears. And: “Who is it!” and “ _Keep firing!_ ”

His shoulder is _screaming_ , something in his arm suddenly feels unpleasantly loose and numb. He shifts his blaster fully into his right hand, fires off three more wide-shot volleys, and manages to sling himself into the hatch opening. 

The incline is mild and short, but his heartbeat is racing and he can still hear blaster fire behind him, so the slide down to the catwalk feels frenetic and disorienting. He catches his left elbow on the edge of the opening, and it jars his shoulder. He goes down onto his knees on the grate metal, gasping with pain, and it takes him two tries before he can stumble back onto his feet.

It’s even colder here than in the backend corridor. There is ice already forming on the meteor rock walls, and the catwalk is slick with condensation. His boots are slipping, as he goes, making his way as quickly as possible away from the fire hatch and into the warren of catwalks below the backend corridors.

He doesn’t look at his shoulder. He knows what it is. He knows he’s bleeding. He knows he’s been hit and the shot has seared the skin and severed some halfway vital tendon. His arm is feeling heavier and heavier by the second and he gives into the indulgence of hiking it up at the elbow and clutching it against his chest, like a drooping wing. But he doesn’t look at it.

Behind him, there’s only silence. They must not have thought him relevant enough to follow, or else he may have been deemed to pose some kind of outsized threat. He pauses at a bend in the catwalk, catching his breath, and bares his teeth, at the prideful but unlikely thought of it.

He can feel it already, the way the cold is pulling at him: making his mind sluggish and his limbs uncooperative. _Higher ground_ , he thinks, but when he cranes his neck to the webbing of hatch ladders around him, he’s not sure where he is. With the shock of his shoulder and the adrenaline of the escape, he’s not sure if he remembered to go _in_ , rather than _out_.

_Hux_.

He spins, where he is. The echo sounded like it came from behind him, but there’s no one there. His blaster is primed and sighted at only empty, cold air.

_Hux_.

“Ren?” he says it aloud, before he even has time to think. His voice ricochets off the wet rock walls. Of course—Ren.

_Where are you?_

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m. Still in the backend, I think. Catwalk level, below.”

It feels tremendously stupid, to be speaking out loud to the empty and cavernous dark. And yet—even the feeling of Ren’s voice inside his head, it stills some of the frantic trembling in his extremities, the chatter of his teeth. 

_You’re close_.

“Where are _you_ , what is thi—”

A strange sensation, then. In the dark, it is like someone has reached out and touched the very middle of the inside of his ribs from a very particular direction.

“Ren,” he says. “Ren, was that—”

_Pay attention_. 

Again, it happens. It is oddly penetrative, vaguely warming, _compelling_. He can feel as though there is a long, buzzing coil of static energy from one end to the space from which it came, touching his own pulse inside him. The drag of it, he can sense its origins: ten feet down, around a curve, off to the right, just _barely_ visible in the dimness— _that hatch_ , he thinks. He _knows_ , somehow.

He gets to the ladder, hauls himself up one-handed with his blaster gripped in his weakening left palm, feeling the wheeze in his lungs grow louder even as he can feel the tug at his ribs strengthening, with every rung.

Awkwardly, he props himself against the top of the ladder, finds the valve-hatch with freezing and shaking fingers, hauls it to its open position with a grunt, and pauses.

“What can you see?” He whispers, his temple pressed to the hatch door. “Is it safe?”

_Mostly._

“Not helpful,” he mutters.

The tug inside his chest tightens, so hard it makes him _gasp_ , and then suddenly the hatch door is being wrenched open from the outside and he’s tumbling forward, being caught gracelessly around the arm and hauled to his feet in a rough grip.

It’s only the now-familiar feeling of those hands on him, and the scent of burned-up oxygen, that keeps him from throwing an elbow.

“They're close. Get on my six,” Ren says, releasing him. “Now.”

“Where the fuck have you been?!” Armitage snarls, leveling the blaster just beyond Ren’s left shoulder.

“Sending a message.” Ren looks vaguely feral, slightly out of breath, as if the thinning oxygen is affecting even him. There’s a pale flush on his cheeks, his hair is still undone and hangs tangled to his shoulders. “Your comms didn't work.”

“ _My comms didn't work,_ ” Armitage growls, squinting through the blaster sight. “Of course they didn't work, they're _broken_. And they're not _mine_.”

“I didn't know that,” Ren says, tightly, moving to Armitage’s side, his saber hisses, sputters.

“ _Everything_ is broken on this blasted rock,” he says, risking a glance back at Ren.

“They’re here,” says Ren.

“I know. Already encountered, but I don’t think they followed.”

“You’re bleeding.” Ren looks startled by the revelation, eyes settled on the way Armitage still has his left arm curled up against his chest. He shuts off his weapon—it sucks the thin air around it with a hiss—makes to turn Armitage to examine his shoulder. 

Armitage jabs him with his good elbow, fending him off. “Well spotted,” he says, a little more nastily than he needs to, through his increasing wheeze. “I’m ignoring it.”

Ren’s jaw is working, his hand flexing at his side.

“Are you—” he starts. Pauses. And then: “You’re fine.”

“Yes,” Armitage says, grimly. “I’m _fine_.” 

Ren nods. “We have to go.”

“ _Where_ ,” Armitage spits. “You don’t have a ship.”

“We’ll steal one,” says Ren. “It’s not hard.”

The only thing stopping him from rolling his eyes is the training keeping his gaze locked through his blaster sight, pointed at the end of the corridor. 

“Are you coming?” says Ren.

“What?”

Ren grabs his waist, suddenly hot and solid and close at his side, looking at him intently—not battle-strained focus, but something else entirely.

“Answer me,” he says. “Are you coming, Hux?”

If he wanted to be cruel, he could tell Ren that there wasn’t another _option_ at this point, that he’d been manhandled and coerced so far into a corner that the only way out was the one Ren had made for him. If he wanted to be cruel, he could run again, take his own ship, and get as far away from the new disaster as he could before something caught him by the ankle and dragged him back. If he wanted to be cruel, he could say that if he was coming, it was never for Ren. If he wanted to be cruel, he could say no.

Instead, he thinks about seeing snow in Ren’s hair. About blood on his father’s chin. About shards of glass collecting in his palms. About the pain in his shoulder now and the panicked lightness in his chest before, when Ren had told him what he’d come for. Later, he may blame it on hypothermia and blood loss, that he thinks of only this, and that he feels no urge to cruelty at all.

“Yes,” he says.

Ren’s face splits in a wide, lopsided grin. It’s so utterly foreign and _stupid_ looking, with its uneven toothiness and crinkling of the cauterized scar, that for a moment Armitage is terrified that he’s is going to do something insane like lean in and _kiss him_ , right there.

“Good,” Ren says. It’s fierce, and makes something curl hotly in the bottom of Armitage’s gut. “Come on.”

Ren’s hand slips from his waist, and grabs at his wrist, and tugs at him, as they run. 

\--

“I said _right_ ,” Armitage hisses, in Ren’s ear. They’re crouched at a corner, three-quarters of the way to the shipbay through the back corridors, and Armitage has managed to wrench his wrist from Ren’s grip a good ten minutes ago, if only so he could actually have the use of his blaster. The air is _freezing_ , his breathing is getting more and more labored, and he can start to feel the spread of the weakening ache along his left arm more acutely. Ren looks unbothered, if only slightly out of breath.

Ren just holds up a hand. “They’re close.”

“They’ll have it surrounded. It’s the only way out.”

“What about the salvage bays?” 

Armitage shakes his head. “Connected. It’s the same airlock out, just through the blast doors.”

Ren’s eyes narrow, in his profile. “Three or four, coming this way.” 

Armitage leans his back against the rough corridor wall, primes his blaster. He can hear the thump of boots now, not that far away. He bares his teeth, sucks a gulp of ice-cold air into his lungs. “We can take them.”

Ren glances back at him, just wordlessly looking, for a moment. 

“Stay behind me,” is all he says, before he stands, and ducks around the corner with his saber blazing to life.

“Oh, like _hell_!” Armitage snaps, and shoves himself to his feet.

By the time he’s around the corner, Ren has two ‘Troopers down, one bisected diagonally from shoulder to ribs, and the other twitching, half-alive, less one arm. Ren has his free arm extended, his saber still sizzling and splitting the air at his side, and across the width of the corridor, a third unfortunate ‘Trooper is clutching frantically, uselessly, at its own throat, suspended three feet in the air. 

Armitage clenches his teeth, and raises his blaster, and shoots the ‘Trooper in the exposed and vulnerable side of the neck, below the jaw of the helmet. Its arms jerk, and then fall limply at its side. It collapses fully, armor clattering, when Ren drops his arm and turns on Armitage, eyes narrowed like maybe he's been offended by Armitage’s crack-shot.

“Don’t show off,” Armitage orders. “We don’t have time.”

“I wasn’t showing o—” 

Armitage raises an eyebrow.

Ren’s mouth snaps shut.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” says Armitage, holstering his blaster and crouching down to relieve one of the dead Stormtroopers of their rifle, tucking it awkwardly under his good arm and checking the sight. 

“You don't need that,” says Ren.

Armitage glares at him.

“You have me,” says Ren. “Come on.”

“I'll take my chances with both,” mutters Armitage as he stands, rifle in hand, although it makes something very disorienting and not entirely unpleasant happen to the inside of his chest. The adrenaline is warming him, but the bodies of the Stormtroopers, as he steps over them to join Ren at the end of the corridor, steam in the frigid air.

“How much further?” says Ren, glancing back at him.

“Straight,” says Armitage, adjusting the rifle awkwardly. “A hundred yards. Then right, at the end of that corridor. They’ll be posted at the blast doors.”

“I’ll take care of it,” say Ren, flatly, already starting off.

Armitage curses, jogging after him. “We need a _plan_ ,” he hisses.

“Get through,” says Ren. “Steal a ship. Get out.”

_That’s not a plan,_ he wants to scream, but Ren’s strides are long and purposeful, and the thinning air, the heavy pulse of pain in his shoulder, the numbness growing in his fingers and his thighs—there’s no other choice, he knows. He said _yes_ , to Ren. He has dragged himself, however reluctantly, however truthfully, into a place where there is nothing left to do but _trust_ him.

Two steps behind Ren, he can see where there is the beginning of a smudge of bruises on the side of Ren’s throat. Where pinpricks of fingerpads pressed down on the yielding skin, where _his_ hands had been. _I would have crawled to you_ , Ren had gasped, and he had _wanted_ Armitage: wanted his body and his shame and his rage, and his hands, there, on his neck. 

He almost trips, when he realizes. 

What an inconvenient moment, he thinks. What an incredibly _stupid_ thing to have to have inside himself, now, half-frozen and mid-skirmish, injured and deeply unsure of the chances of their own survival—the truth of Ren’s belief in him. 

“Hux.”

He startles. Ren is half-crouched just shy of the corner of the corridor intersection, voice pitched low. His chin jerks, urging Armitage closer. 

Armitage hunches down beside him, feeling the solid breadth of his body, the nearly unbelievable warmth he’s still radiating, even in the deepening cold. He leans forward, cranes his neck just enough to glance around the corner, and manages to catch a glimpse of what they’d already known: a white cluster of ‘Troopers guarding the entrance to the shipbay.

“Shit,” he mutters, pulling back. “There's too many. At least three dozen.”

“Thirty-nine,” says Ren, breath steaming in the air.

Armitage slings the strap of the rifle over his neck and primes it, feeling grim. “We can't go back.”

“We're going through,” says Ren, leaning forward onto his toes where he's crouching. He smells like seared blood, sparking air. “Get up.”

“We can't go through, there's—”

“Use my cover,” says Ren, and then he's on his feet, around the corner, lightsaber spitting to life again.

“ _Shit—_ ” Armitage scrambles, hefting the rifle against his uninjured shoulder, shoving himself to standing against the wall.

There's a shout, a volley of fire, and Armitage ducks when a stray blast ricochets around the corridor bend.

“Hux!” Ren shouts. “Now!”

“You could warn me next time!” Armitage shouts back, and shoves off from the wall, staying low when he slides out into the corridor, firing.

Ren is standing as if braced against some great wind, one long arm extended out in front of him: the volley of blaster shots from the far end of the corridor seem to rush at him, and then distend, break apart, fly off to spark and sputter against the walls and the ceilings in a noisy shower of yellow and orange light, as if they have met the curved surface of some wide and unyielding invisible barrier. Armitage crouches low, just at the edge of Ren’s right knee, and fires back as steadily as he can manage with the rifle tucked in against his uninjured shoulder. Three ‘Troopers on the front line go down: there is a renewed pulse of fire from behind them, and Armitage catches the moment out of the corner of his eye when Ren’s stance wavers, almost imperceptibly. 

“How long can you keep this up?!” Armitage shouts, over the pitch of fire and the metallic sparking around them.

Ren’s face in profile is grim, his jaw is clenched. The saber hisses in his other hand, throwing a wash of red light over them like a beacon.

“ _Ren_!” He shouts again, still firing. His left shoulder is _screaming_ , now. He feels where the warm ooze of blood is starting to stiffen in the freezing air, sticking to his seared skin, pulling painfully when the rifle kicks with every shot.

Ren growls, teeth bared, and his body heaves. He takes two, and then three, long dragging steps forward, as if he is pressing the whole bulk of some invisible and struggling weight into the closing space between them and the cluster of ‘Troopers.

“Shit,” Armitage hisses, and heaves himself to standing. He presses up against Ren’s back, resting the barrel of the rifle against Ren’s shoulder, and resumes firing.

“Almost,” Ren grinds out. His whole body is shaking; the ricochet of blaster fire around them seems to be encroaching, growing closer, as if Ren is unable to keep the deluge fully at bay, as if he might be weakening. 

“Almost _what_ ,” Armitage shouts.

“On my mark,” Ren says, in his ear. “Stop firing.”

“Wha—”

Suddenly, in front of them, through the wavering air of Ren’s invisible power, Armitage can see the blast door behind the ‘Troopers hiss open, creaking with rusted joints, and then a great shout goes up—the block of white armor in front of them seems to splinter and unfold in a frenetic upheaval. More yelling, and Armitage is still firing into the fray with as much precision as he can manage, and then, somehow, there is _more_ blaster fire in their direction, cutting down the ‘Troopers from behind, sparking off the walls and ceiling and sputtering loudly against Ren’s shield. 

“Ren—” he starts to yell, in confusion.

_Now_.

It’s in his head, Ren’s voice, but it freezes his finger on the trigger. The rest of it seems to happen in a form of extended, elastic time, where Armitage is inside a slice of space where his mind seems to register the fall, but his own body can’t seem to respond. Sound drops off, the air seems to freeze, and Ren twists, where he is standing. The saber powers off, and Ren shoves the whole weight of his body against Armitage’s, one hand coming up to cradle the underside of his injured shoulder and the other gripped hard at the curve of Armitage’s skull as he sends them both crashing against the wall of the corridor and then down, to the ground. The rifle goes skittering across the floor, and Ren lands on top of him, curled like a great and suffocating pocket of dark, warm air.

Sound and time comes back him in a single, overwhelming rush. Around them, there is the pounding of continued blaster fire, more shouting, and Ren has both of his hands still gripped painfully hard on Armitage’s body. 

“Stop _rescuing_ me,” he hisses, into the folds of Ren’s tunic.

Ren lifts his head to glare at him, before a single shot explodes just above them, and they both flinch, Ren bowing his body over Armitage’s like a wide shield and Armitage clenching his eyes shut, curling up against Ren’s chest involuntarily.

Silence, then. Sudden and disorienting. Armitage can feel where Ren’s heartbeat is pounding, hard and fast, against his own chest, can feel the wash of Ren’s hot breath against his neck, can feel his own pulse skittering in his veins, the jittering shock of adrenaline in his system. 

“Commander!” 

That voice—Armitage’s eyes snap open and he shoves at Ren’s shoulder. That _voice_. 

“Commander Ren. We received your message.”

Ren pulls himself off with a grunt, still crouching at Armitage’s knees. Behind him, standing straight and unnaturally tall, with her armor still polished but strangely dented in places as if it has not seen the usual care in several months, rifle still at the ready, her chrome helmet uncharacteristically missing, and her short white-blond hair in disarray around her square jaw—

“Captain,” he croaks. 

“You let him get shot,” Phasma says, accusingly, to Ren, who is shoving to standing, brushing off the front of his tunic, and looking unfairly smug.

“He’s fine,” says Ren, reaching down to pull Armitage up by his uninjured arm.

“I’m fine,” says Armitage, struggling to his feet. “I’m—”

“The General! _It’s the General_!” 

Shouts rising from down the corridor. Armitage gapes—he can’t help it—at the sight of a smattering of unhelmeted and ragged-looking troops gathered at the open blast doors, standing guard over the pile of downed Stormtroopers. They look dirty, unranked, half-familiar faces. Several of them have their blasters raised in salute.

“Captain!” One of them calls at Phasma, gesturing them into the shipbay. Her uniform would have once identified her as a Sergeant, but her jacket is open at the throat, she’s hoisting a ‘Trooper regulation F-11, and there’s a gaping, torn absence where her First Order insignia would have blazed on her arm. “We’re secure!”

“Congratulations later.” Phasma jerks her head. Her grim, thin mouth, though, has the subtle curve of pride. “We’ve got two Upsilons and half a TIE squadron to escort you out before they send reinforcements.”

\--

“Someone get him a medkit!” Phasma barks, as they’re hustled into one of the two waiting shuttles, engines still primed and purring. “Wings up, _now_.”

“Captain, we’ve got three FO squadrons incoming in two minut—” One of the console chairs turns, and the occupant stops short when he sees the three of them—Phasma, Ren, and Armitage—coming up the plank. He wears no cap, his uniform appears to be in a similar state of overwearing as the rest of Phasma’s group, the insignia likewise torn from the arm of his jacket. His pale, familiar face goes ashen at the sight of them, his mouth falls open. 

“Lieutenant,” says Armitage. 

“G-general!” Mitaka leaps to his feet, one arm snapping to salute. His eyes are suddenly very wet looking.

Armitage tries, unsuccessfully, to remember the last thing he might have said to him, nearly two years ago, with the ravenous explosion of _Starkiller_ still at their heels. He hadn’t known, he supposes, what would happen. None of them had. And he’d had such high expectations—

“Medkit, Mitaka!” Phasma yells, again, where she is bent over one of the pilot consoles.

“Ye—yes sir!” Mitaka scrambles, ducking into the annex room at the back of the shuttle as the whole thing roars to life, lifting off with a jolt.

Ren grips at Armitage’s elbow, even before Armitage feels himself the moment that he staggers, his adrenaline dropping with a dizzying swoop at the same time the shuttle speeds out the airlock and judders into hard bank out of orbit, leaps into hyperdrive. His knees go _weak_ , something buzzes in his ears.

“Sit,” says Ren. Softly, and very close.

Exhaustion more powerful than pride, now, he lets himself be guided onto a bulkhead seat. Ren sits beside him and pries the rifle from where he’s still gripping it in one hand, tossing it onto the floor. Mitaka reappears with the medkit, and Armitage lets himself be manhandled into gingerly shedding his greatcoat, now wet with dirty water and stiff with blood.

“Sorry, sir,” Mitaka is saying, as he leans in to peel away the soaked-through collar of Armitage’s shirt, carefully swiping at the wound with a sanicloth.

Armitage lets his eyes fall closed; swallows down his hiss at the vague sting of pain. Beside him, Ren’s body still feels as though it is thrumming with that immense power and warmth, as if he has parted something vital in the structure of the universe and it is still struggling to put itself back together around him. Exhaling, Armitage lets his hand fall open against the side of Ren’s thigh, as if it might somehow be possible to draw it in, through his skin. 

“It’s—” Mitaka’s voice seems very far away. “It’s very good to see you, sir.”

Armitage opens his eyes, and watches, blearily, as Mitaka seals the wound with a bacta-patch, sets it in place with more gel, wraps it carefully with more sanicloth, and bandages. He can feel the numbing warmth already setting in, the strange sensation of blood clotting, skin knitting, cells reinvigorated and sliding tentatively back into their place. Organic matter readjusting to the damage done, adaptive and resilient. 

“Good work, Lieutenant.” His voice is thick, hoarse. (He tells himself, absently, that it’s just exhaustion.)

Mitaka _beams_.

“We have clearance from Bay One,” Phasma calls, from the bow of the shuttle. “Wings down in three.”

And there, as the shuttle drops from hyperspace with a subtle jolt, Armitage can see through the transparisteel of the console port, the moment that the great geometric underbelly of the _Finalizer_ curves into view. Something very full and terrifying and _bright_ surges and clenches in his chest. 

“Welcome back, General,” says Ren. His eyes, when Armitage turns to look at him, are glittering: the gentle, endless curve of the universe reflected.

\-- 

The shuttle is hissing as Mitaka and Phasma run through power-off, together. Armitage waits with his elbows on his knees, Ren still silent beside him. Outside the shuttle, Armitage thinks he can hear it: the oddly familiar pulse of ion engines quieting, the rhythmic shouts of the mechs guiding the TIE fighters into their docks, the dull _slap-slap-slap-slap_ of boots on a polished surface.

“We’re ready for you, sir,” says Phasma, standing. The plankway of the shuttle creaks, latches opening, and then starts to open. 

Quietly, Ren stands and gathers up Armitage’s greatcoat where it’s been discarded on the bulkhead beside him. He shakes it out, and then—very carefully—drapes it around Armitage’s shoulders, tugging at the lapels until they fall straight. 

For a brief and hysterical moment, Armitage thinks about kissing him. Thinks about surging upward and grabbing at the thick tangle of Ren’s hair with both of his hands and devouring his mouth with his own until he is fed whatever strength and life and belief and power Ren seems so willing to give him. He could do that now, Armitage realizes. He has been given a thing in the world where he is able to reach out and take that kind of fortifying pleasure from another person, if he wanted to.

Ren’s mouth twitches.

“Stop that,” Armitage mutters, cheeks suddenly hot. He slides one hand through his hair, pushing it back, attempting to smooth it away from his face.

Ren just shrugs, shameless. Holds out his wrist and tugs a small black band out from underneath his gloves, hands it wordlessly to Armitage.

Armitage takes it, awkwardly knots the unkempt length of his hair through it. A laughable attempt at regulation, but passably presentable.

“Well,” says Armitage, slowly pulling himself to standing, straightening his spine and throwing his shoulders back as much as he is able with the tug of the bacta-patch at his skin. “Good?”

“Yes,” says Ren. It is serious, Armitage realizes. He means it.

Behind them, the plankway clangs onto the floor of the bay, and Phasma steps down onto it, Mitaka following. The dim interior of the shuttle floods with a long slice of pure, white light. A shout goes up. The rough pounding of a salute, heavy boots stomping on a polished durasteel floor. 

He stands, just shy of the entrance, with the powerful flutter of his heartbeat in his throat. Ren’s hand is on his lower back: resting there with just the hint of pressure, warm and solid. Armitage thinks, for a moment, about the way that he knows that a forest can surge forth again from beneath a blanket of ash and snow, the way a broken fuse can be rerouted, the way life can persist like a wriggling virus on the shell of every dead rock in the galaxy, the way a blaster can jam, a mischance of meeting can occur, whole worlds can blink out, suns can swallow the orbits of lesser existences in their death, something can shatter into splintered shards beyond repair—and none of this is ever really the end of anything. 

And then, squinting in the brightness, he steps forward into the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm on [tumblr](http://badspacebabies.tumblr.com)!


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